Posted By WilliamHeise on July 27, 2010

Found this on the web today. It is an exchange between Pat Buchanan and Zbigniew Brzezinski on the Morning Joe program on MSNBC. Buchanan is trying to articulate a point about the complicated political atmosphere in America today, and Brzezinski credits this to a return of a ‘national malaise’ to American politics.

The Old Malaise

This is an idea that was put forth in one of the most depressing speeches by Jimmy’s Carter towards the end of his depressing administration.

Growing up in America in the 70s, I hated the national malaise, and this is why I liked the 80s so much. If we were to believe Carter, the best days of America were behind us. America had been captured by special (and moneyed) interests. Here’s an excerpt:

What you see often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.

Carter was attempting to restore ‘balance’ to a country that had gotten off track so he could move the country forward.

You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?

President Carter had an answer:

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

‘A City on a Hill’

In the election of Ronald Reagan to replace Carter, the country moved beyond the national malaise. Growing older in Ronald Reagan’s America, I was able to see beyond Carter’s malaise speech to a vision of America restored to its ‘City on a Hill’ status.

This is an old idea in America, going back to Winthrop’s invocation of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14) in his 1630 sermon ‘A Model of Christian Charity.’

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God… We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.

The modern version of this idea was born of JFK’s invocation of the ‘city on a hill’ metaphor during an address to the General Court of Massachusetts on January 9, 1961.

…I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. “We must always consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.” Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill — constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required.

It has come to dominate political discourse on both the left and the right ever since. Ronald Reagan invoked it during the campaign in 1984, as well as during his Farewell Address to the Nation in 1989:

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.

This is the ‘city on a hill,’ a city of equal opportunity for all, that Sarah Palin spoke of wresting from the unbalanced hands of Barack Obama, who wanted to redistribute wealth from one well-fed group who has prospered to other groups who have been shunted aside.

I’ve Seen the World From Both Sides Now

But both sides are arguing about ownership of the right to carry the JFK torch forward. Mario Cuomo took Reagan to task for his remarks during his Keynote Address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention (watch the whole speech here):

Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn’t understand that fear. He said, “Why, this country is a shining city on a hill.” And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city’s splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation — Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a “Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”

This speech has resonated with a sector of Democratic electorate, who want to restore balance in an unbalanced world. This is the sector of the electorate that Zbigniew Brzezinski hales from. He wants to restore balance to all, while accusing Republicans of merely capitalizing on political uncertainty.

The New Malaise

We were, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protectors of liberal and capitalist freedom in the world. But now, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, we are back to a vague sense of ‘malaise.’ I think it is important to contest his assertion that we are in for a permanent decline if we don’t restore the American ideal—held by Barack Obama in his mind—to prominence.

When I saw this story, I thought I’d have a go at the return of the ‘malaise’ story, if only to show how wrong I think both parties are about what’s gone wrong in the idealistic world of Jimmy Carter—who thought that all we as Americans had to do was to restore ‘balance’ to the unbalanced world—and the idealistic world of Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill’—which relies on a sense of American exceptionalism, rather than a more realistic view of the world that we live in.

Mr. Buchanan starts out by detailing the problems faced by President Obama. Brzezinski starts out his response by saying that he ‘can’t really articulate this’ (0:18), but that doesn’t stop him from articulating. He begins his argument with the sentence ‘I have a sense that there were always mobilizing issues’ (0:25). No surprise there. There have always been ‘mobilizing issues,’ haven’t there? Like, maybe, the public’s overwhelming concern with running up deficits with no spending cuts in sight? Well, no. Apparently not, according to Brzezinski. ‘Mobilizing issues’ have been replaced with a ’sense of pervasive malaise’ (0:45).

One momentarily suspects that Brzezinski is either not being an honest provider of unbiased news coverage, or he honestly hasn’t looked at the polls and found out what is going on in this country, which is obvious to me anyway. People, especially on the right, are ‘mobilized’ by issue of uncontrolled spending. There’s a third possibility, however, and that is that he doesn’t have enough insight into the situation and is instead relying on traditional ideas—in this case the ideas of Jimmy Carter—to make up for what he ‘can’t articulate.’

Now my response to Brzezinski at this point is that maybe he should have shut up as soon as he realized that he couldn’t articulate his answer, but he doesn’t. Instead, he goes on to lay the blame at the doorstep of a ‘pervasive malaise.’ Since this is the point of my major disagreement with the former National Security Adviser to the President of the United States of America, I want quote him in full:

‘I think we’re now going through a phase in which there is a sense of pervasive malaise which affects different group of society in different ways’ (0:45).

In other words, the general sense of communal action—the sense that Obama was elected to provide against McCain’s government for the individual—is lacking, and like Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski puts that onto a ‘sense of pervasive malaise,’ rather than thinking more about exactly why he ‘can’t articulate’ his ideas.

Looking Deeper into the New Malaise

This is an important point. The loss of common goals is the sense that Obama ran on and which was the source of his popularity— Brzezinski himself says ‘Obama, who started so well; he captivated people; he captivated me.’ Obama has lost his edge. Brzezinski wants that common sense of purpose back from the ‘special interests’ that have captivated peoples’ imagination. ‘In their own sphere, there is no grand mobilizing idea’ (1:00), he says.

Then he gets to the root of the problem, as he sees it: ‘Obama has not been able yet to generate some sort of organizing idea for an age which combines a malaise that is pervasive and percolating and complexity’ (1:20). His addition of ‘yet’ into the sentence says that he still holds out hope for Obama’s comprehensive idea that would unify the nation, as opposed to ‘people like Romney, Gingrich, or Palin. Each one motivates a slice of all of these concerns…None of them have a comprehensive idea’ (2:10).

Why doesn’t Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin get credit for having a ‘comprehensive’ plan, I ask myself? They just don’t. It is an argument that relies on his initial premises—a petitio principii in the language of philosophy. He has already decided that Romney, Gingrich, and Palin are not serious and honest players in the political arena, and he has no problem with dismissing their pretensions to higher goals. But with Obama, he sees no problem glossing over his Chicago-style, one party town politics in favor of his candidate’s loftier goals. This is a function of how he represents the two parties in his mind before he starts reasoning.

Pat Buchanan agrees: ‘We need a new paradigm’ (2:16).

‘And the President hasn’t articulated it,’ Brzezinski says (2:18).

Paradigm shifts? Yuck! I learned about such things in graduate school from the work of Thomas Kunhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I didn’t like them then, and I don’t particularly feel that they are better today.

Here, in a nutshell, is why. Kuhn believes that science is a step from one discrete paradigm to another.

As Wikipedia puts it:

One important aspect of Kuhn’s paradigms is that the paradigms are incommensurable, meaning two paradigms cannot be reconciled with each other because they cannot be subjected to the same common standard of comparison. That is, no meaningful comparison between them is possible without fundamental modification of the concepts that are an intrinsic part of the paradigms being compared. This way of looking at the concept of “paradigm” creates a paradox of sorts, since competing paradigms are in fact constantly being measured against each other.

Power and a subsequent quest for control follow the person who has the ‘dominant’ paradigm. This makes it important to gain political power. So news networks get ‘both sides’ of an issue in a room and have them argue with each other.

But the exchange between Buchanan and Brzezinski says (to me) that both partners only appear to be on opposite sides of the question. In fact, they are operating on a similar set of assumptions. The same is true of Reagan and Cuomo. Both have the image of JFK’s ‘city on a hill’ in mind, and they are squabbling over property rights.

Idealism’s Failure

The idealism of both liberals and the neoconservatives that sprung up as neocons got nervous about the over-reliance on Marx, is founded on the legacy of JFK, in particular on his ‘city on a hill’ speech.

And it is dying.

The Other Other Side

I would say that the reason that Brzezinski has not been able to articulate his new paradigm because the whole paradigm on which both parties operate in America today is fatally flawed. Each party in the political sphere since JFK has tried to capture the mantle of providing the true ‘city on a hill’ from the other party. An, as each party is engaged in their relentless battle of capture the flag, they not only have to defend their territory, but they must also attack the enemy fortress, denying the other’s ability to lay claim to the common flag.

There is no reason to have a debate in an all-or-nothing argument. The winner takes all. The loser gets nothing. This is the way that the Founding Father set up this country. It puts pressure on people to win arguments by any means, and not through the use of reason.

This is the problem with idealism in general when applied to the political sphere. Politics is a game like American football. We are not throwing for a touchdown on every play. Sometimes players run to the end zone to catch a Hail Mary pass, but at other times they hand the ball off to a runner, who may only gain 2 or 3 yards.

But people who go on television and declare that Republicans or Democrats have no rights to even be on the field (and wouldn’t be except for the ignorance that the idealist stands against) are wrong. It is not ignorance that drives the other side to dismiss arguments that those on the right side of the issue are educated enough to have taken notice of. Politics is not the domain of the ideal. It falls under the domain of reason, and reason proceeds sometimes in yards. Not every position is the last position a politician will ever take.

What’s more, the rational position is more flexible than the position taken by the absolute idealist who throws for a touchdown on every play. Most Hail Mary passes fail to find a receiver, but by mixing up the plays, a quarterback can effectively move the play closer to the ultimate goal. In the political environment in Washington today, the spirit of compromise has been utterly lost in spite of the fact that Obama was elected on a ‘comprehensive’ platform of changing Washington.

Reason has been lost in the pursuit of ‘comprehensiveness’ that is so dear to Brzezinski’s heart. It is not that it is not there. It is that it has been hidden from us and them by the all-or-nothing game that politicians are playing in Washington. Thus, I call reason the unexplored side (the other other side) in the battle for political supremacy.

Back to Zbigniew

Brzezinski’s lament for the failure of ‘comprehensive’ idea that Obama may yet (in Brzezinski’s mind) deliver means that for the present we must endure 2 or 6 more years of Obama’s blindness to compromise, as he forces a series of changes through the Congress on straight party-line votes. Each member of Congress is preordained to align themselves with their political party—and thus against their constituents—in the battle for control.

And this is because Brzezinski holds out the hope that Obama will be cajoled into delivering the undeliverable, while maintaining the also untenable position that Republicans have nothing more on their side than their service of ’special interests’ in a turf battle over control of the whole country.

There is enough blame to go around on both sides. So, before Zbigniew Brzezinski speaks again, I would urge him to think before he speaks about things he ‘can’t really articulate,’ rather than reflexively going back to the failed policies of a ‘comprehensive idea. That is the problem with idealism and its argument to already held premises. The country will only move forward by articulating its premises in the albeit imperfect reason rather the than the perfect potential of ideas that we all have in our head but which we can’t articulate fully.

The city on a hill has outlived its usefulness in a complex day and age. It’s time to try something less satisfying to partisans, who want total control of the most powerful government in the world, but works for the rest of us.

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 26, 2010

There are several reasons I prefer the 80s over the 70s. Perhaps the most important was that I missed the high point of the 80s electronic music. This was on account of my having lived through the 70s, with its sappy music.

I was paying attention in the 70s. But by the 80s, I dropped out of the music culture entirely and turned myself to books, which I read obsessively. I didn’t even have a television so I didn’t know about the revolution of MTV, and so I didn’t think about it very much.

Every once in a while, a piece of music would capture my attention. Of those that did, here are the most important:

1) Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”

I saw this video at my friends’ house only once, but it stuck with me, probably because it was the first video I had ever seen. I remember more bullets slicing through more cards.

2) A Flock Of Seagulls’ “I Ran”

This was the second video I ever saw. It was on a visit to see one of my friends at college.

I was intrigued by this video, probably because I was not aware that that hairstyle had become so popular.

3) Jan Hammer’s “Theme From Miami Vice”

I never actually saw the third video, but I was aware of Jan Hammer from his work with Jeff Beck and in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which I had been introduced to by Leroy Plock. His work on Miami Vice was an extension of his work in the progressive band, but far more accessible to the general public. I also thought that it was extremely interesting that he was not only playing the keyboards on the keyboards, but also the drums and everything else. That was not possible on the sort of synthesizer that Leroy had in 1981. I still like this song for that reason.

4) Madonna’s “Material Girl”

The first time I saw a video that made me take notice of the video, and not the music, was Madonna’s “Material Girl.” I’m still impressed with the video. Less so with its creator.

5) Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”

I really enjoyed this song in the late 80s in spite of not listening to radio. The guy above me played only one album for the entire semester (The Big Chill) when I went back to college, so I would go out walking. As I walked, people were always playing this song:

Perhaps you’re thinking that I should have been warned that people in the 80s were playing terrible music and that I should have known better, but I was but 3 and 20, and O ’tis true, ’tis true.

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 21, 2010

Busy, busy, busy this week. No time to write much. I was researching what I intended to write about this week, but I ran out of time. In the course of my research, I found an article about gamelan music. I don’t know much about gamelan music, and I’m sure this is a bastardized version, but I love it.

Great rhythm section. 2 sets of drums, 2 keyboards, 2 Kulintang players, and a pair of Nibelungs crashing away with their hammers.

Rock on, Nibelungs!

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 12, 2010

So I’ve been meaning to get around to my defense of the 80s over the 70s as a great era of musical innovation, so here goes. I’ll start out with my experience in college.

The 60s and 70s were great, and their influences endure (see my post on Higher, which reworks very old and respectable ideas) but I didn’t connect with the music of my youth. Music, then, was a social vehicle for me in high school; my friends were listening to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, so I did too. I didn’t develop my own taste until college.

When I got to college, I was not a follower of others, as I had been in high school. I was for awhile a leader of taste (yeah, I know it’s hard to believe). Everybody was listening to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin—it was 1980—but I showed up with an album that no one at Ripon had heard of: Pink Floyd’s Meddle. So one day, we started listening to albums and we started to debate the question of which song was the best song to listen to when one was stoned—remember, it was 1980. Several people played their favorites, and then I put on “Echoes” from Meddle. And everyone agreed that I had excellent musical taste.

So I went home and bought more music that I had heard on the radio that I thought would be good for stoners to listen to. I brought back The Talking Heads Fear of Music and Remain in Light.

At first, my friends resisted my excellent taste in music, but then I had them up and listen to Fear of Music, which has a song called “Drugs.” Here it is, for the curious:

My favorite song on all my Talking Heads albums was The Great Curve. This would still rank towards the top of my 10 favorite songs (I have never compiled such a list, and, if I did, I suspect that there would be over 750 songs in my list of my top 10 favorites of all-time). Anyway, here it is:

The reason I liked this song so much was that it stepped away from the notion that there were some people in the world who had “it” (and by “it” they meant musical taste). Not ever having been a driver of musical taste, I was looking for an area of music that I could call my own. The Talking Heads were experimenting with African rhythms and a complex counterpoint.

Wikipedia has this to say about that:

The members of Talking Heads wanted to make an album that dispelled notions of frontman and chief lyricist David Byrne leading a back-up band. They decided to experiment with African polyrhythms and, with Eno, recorded the instrumental tracks as a series of samples and loops, a novel idea at the time. Additional musicians were frequently used throughout the studio sessions. The lyric writing process slowed Remain in Light’s progress, but was concluded after Byrne drew inspiration from academic literature on Africa.

This was different than the relatively simple compositional form of the lyrics of Robert Plant. Plant was still using the double-entendre for his lyrics when he composed the lyrics to Achilles Last Stand—Jimmy Page’s favorite Zeppelin song. But the African rhythms were a lot more complex than Plant’s lyrical structures and allowed a lot more of the chaos-in-free-play (that’s my name for it) than we—or at least I—could hear in any Zeppelin song I had ever heard. They could start out their song with a relatively straightforward rhythm and add elements until they had a cacophony of overlapping sounds. I could listen to one section of the music, or I could listen to the whole thing. And I never got bored.

So for about a year, I was one of the ‘beautiful people,’ never a comfortable position for a man who had been to the greatest anti-beautiful people rally ever.

But then I met Leroy Plock. Leroy was a musician from Nebraska. He was into better music than I was (by far). I became his roommate during my second year at Ripon.

So one day, I was listening to one of his David Bowie albums—Aladdin Sane—and I heard the following solo (2:00-3:30):

That solo changed my life. I was not a very musically savvy person (I was not savvy about anything when I went to college), and I asked Leroy about the utterly chaotic (to my mind) music that I had just heard. He listened to it and said he thought it made sense to him in spite of being played off the background rhythm.

So I lost my desire to be a leader of taste among my fellow men. I started listening to Leroy’s jazz albums, which at the time were way over my head. Leroy himself was a huge fan of Keith Jarrett’s, and he would listen to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert recordings all the time. I have only recently discovered them and I absolutely love these improvisations. Read more about them here. This piece of music is sublime, and I would put it in my top 10 pieces of music of all-time. Here’s the second section (of 3) of a piece called “Part I”:

But at the time, I thought Leroy’s taste in music was far over my head. I just didn’t get Leroy’s fixation on Keith Jarrett. But I retreated from my leadership position and became a follower once again. Leroy Plock was the most powerful force in my musical education, and he remains so to this day.

But at first, I started listening to tamer stuff than Keith Jarrett. I started out listening to recordings like this one, by The Jeff Lorber Fusion, entitled “Chinese Medicinal Herbs.” The careful reader will recognize my interest in drug use, here. I didn’t quit using drugs until June 3, 1984 at 2:30 AM. That’s another story altogether. Anyway, I still like this song, so I thought I’d post it for you.

I also like Lorber’s “Tune 88,” which gave me an early introduction to funk:

I began reading some standard novels for 1980 (like Steppenwolf) and dropped out after reading The Glass Bead Game. I was determined to educate myself.

I learned a lot of things during my first failed trip to college.

• The first was that I was over my head, not only musically but in everything else.
• The second thing was about how much I was missing out on by my inability to relate to other, and to my mind greater, music than my own fairly narrow view.

I was determined to break out of my narrow listening patterns—as I was determined to break out of my narrow reading patterns. But first I had to catch up with the rest of the world.

I started out slow, since I didn’t have a very good vocabulary, I looked up every word I encountered that I didn’t know. Within a couple years I had found my stride and was reading Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God. During that time, I stopped listening to music altogether. My television broke in 1984, so I missed the music video revolution, which was powered by musical synthesizers, rather than talented musicians.

The 80s were good to me, and when I started listening to music again in the 90s, I found that the musical instruments themselves, and the methods used to produce sounds, had changed. More on that next week.

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 11, 2010

This just in: they have found King Arthur’s Round Table. Silly me. I had always thought that it was just a myth, but world-renowned King Arthur expert Chris Gidlow, who’s written a book entitled The Reign of Arthur, said: “The first accounts of the Round Table show that it was nothing like a dining table but was a venue for upwards of 1,000 people at a time.”

He goes on to say

“In the 6th Century, a monk named Gildas, who wrote the earliest account of Arthur’s life, referred to both the City of Legions and to a martyr’s shrine within it. That is the clincher. The discovery of the shrine within the amphitheatre means that Chester was the site of Arthur’s court and his legendary Round Table.”

Of course, he also says in his book (page xi) :

Did this King Arthur really exist? Almost certainly not. He was defined by writers of romance fiction in the twelfth century and refined through the Middle Ages. He inhabited a fabulous world based on that of his medieval audience.

Someone’s got some ’splainin’ to do.

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 11, 2010

Okay, let’s review. Here’s how I look at art. The viewer starts out with a Status Quo (that’s ‘the way things are now,’ for the less Latin inclined). But the clever artist has identified a conflict in the Status Quo. The introduction of conflict into the previously untroubled world of the Status Quo means that ‘Art’ must come the rescue. By the end of the piece art--whether it is a narrative or a painting--the artist will have resolved the conflict.

Art, therefore, is necessarily opposed to the Status Quo way of looking at things, and artists tend to gravitate towards odd ways of looking at the world. What is more, they tend to think that people who are satisfied with living in the most prosperous area in human history (the American suburbs) are shallow. Only conflict, the artist says, is good. Complacency is bad. This means that artists will fall on the sid of total revolution more often than they will fall on the side of maintaining the suburban Status Quo. That’s what we all expect.

Of course, there are problems with the anti-Status Quo people (can I call them the Anti-Status-Quo-ites? I think I will). Most Americans live in suburbs, but a select few live in cities. The give a direction in the world away from the complacent suburbs to the big, powerful, capable-of-embracing-change cities. In such a world, the city people don’t need to pay attention to the Anti-Status-Quo-ites who inhabit the complacent suburbs or (horror of horrors!) who inhabit the country. This has, in recent years, divided the country up into Blue States (like New York, California, and Illinois) and Red States (like Montana, Texas, and South Carolina). People from the cities look down on their brothers and sisters from the country and their gun-toting, country-music-loving ways. They don’t even know enough to think about the errors of their ways. And, being ignorant, they do not have to be consulted for their opinion on the Coming Revolution.

They are people who candidate Obama (now President) was talking about when he made this speech during his campaign.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. … And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not,” Obama said.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama said.

Such comment bespeak a real divide in this country, and Obama (in my opinion) did a poor job of explaining away his remarks (though he tried). And Rush Limbaugh continues to push the remark forward to divide Obama from the conservative base. But my goal today is not to attack other people’s political motivations (I say again that I am not political) but to point out the limitations of politics through an example from the world of art.

And so I give you, The Dot and The Line: An Adventure in Lower Mathematics.

Chuck Jones was one of the most gifted animators in history. Before Pixar, he was testing the boundaries of art. And in this short animation (released in 1965), he tested the boundaries of art and human relations through animation.

“Once upon a time, there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a dot” (1:20). It’s a narrative, so there must be conflict. He says, “You’re the beginning and and the end, the hub, the core, and the quintessence” (1:33), but she loves a squiggle “who never seemed to have anything on his mind, at all” (1:40).

This puts the knowing reader in mind of a set of ideas. The line is a too-rigid white male. The dot is a “frivolous” woman looking for love. And the squiggle is the totally free spirit unleashed by the rising spirit of free love. This was the situation I grew up with. I could identify myself as a straight line--I think we called them squares in my day. Women were indifferent to me, except as friends. They preferred squiggles.

The Line learns to bend himself—with great effort, mind you— into a myriad of shapes, while the Squiggle remains the same squiggle. The Dot confronts the Squiggle, who confesses that “I never know how it’s going to turn out” (8:45). The line ends up getting over her obsession with the squiggle, as she suddenly realizes “that what she thought was freedom and joy was nothing but anarchy and sloth” (9:00). She falls in love with the line, who imparts to his life a sense of direction and purpose.

Why Does The Dot Change?

Was it the Line’s ability to bend into shapes that made him so attractive to the formerly “frivolous” Dot? If that were the case, then Chuck Jones would have discovered an “Undeniable Truth,” and we should follow him, directing our energies towards guiding our women towards men like Bill Gates, who have a lot of money, and away from men like Allen Ginsberg.

I don’t think so. The lesson I learned from this cartoon and others like it was that learning is good, while staying the same is bad. This, incidentally, is the same lesson that a careful observer might have learned from watching the 1981 film My Dinner with André. In that film, the squiggly world traveler André has had a myriad experiences, while the stay-at-home lump Wally has led a restricted life at home in New York City. The people like the Line in Chuck Jones’ experimental animation, have the same values in My Dinner with André, but they stay at home in NYC, rather than venturing forth, as the squiggle André has:

New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison.

The Sense of an Ending

So my response to the Dot and the Line is not to jump in because the Line brings a sense of an ending to the Dot’s quest for balance in the world, as opposed to the Squiggle. What matters in both models is that we learn and grow. The direction we grow in is a matter of cultural preference, and culture changes. And as it changes, we change along with it.

In the 60s, we wanted to be squiggles. In the 70s, we wanted to be part of the in-crowd (‘the beautiful people’) of knowers, as opposed to the out-crowd of unknowers. By 1981, we were going back to Chuck Jones’ vision of the universe of human relations. Bill Gates and a hoard of geeks were taking over the world again, and ‘the great unwashed,’ with their dreams of revolution, were on the decline. Then, after a generation of greed, we returned to our idealistic roots with Obama.

Literary critics have often mistaken their feeling that they have arrived at an end for the feeling that others, who have not arrived at the same end as they, have not journeyed at all, but merely have stayed home, like Wally, not thinking at all. This is to mistake art—which must have an ending to every story—with life—where there are often different ways that reason can build on the same foundation of experience. This, in my opinion, is what happened in the 60s.

Culture in the 60s

In the 1960s, America was split along our response to the rise, for the first time in history, of American ideals to the center of the world stage. Liberals threw away the middle ground of changing reason for the absolute ground aesthetics, which offered a permanent and unchanging ground for our human experience. People on the left started talking about revolution to overthrow the power of those who were not embracing change as fast as those ‘in the know’ thought they should be.

The neo-conservative movement was founded at the same time. Neo-conservatives were operating on much of the same ground as the Liberals. They embraced ‘American exceptionalism’ as the end-point of history and wanted their rightwing ‘American’ policies to be embraced over the ‘pinko’ policies of the left.

This divide is still operational in America.

Searching For The Ground of Truth

It is instructive to look at a book by a committed liberal—Arthur Herzog’s The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America—to see how many of his statements would be made by right wing politicians today.

Clearly—whatever else is true of us—Americans are a people deeply deeply mired in their own rhetoric. To get on solid ground will mean to carry on a nonviolent struggle against deception wherever it appears, in institutions and in people. Even more than clean streets, we need clear heads. (27)

Our response, when confronted by such a statement, is to dig deeper towards the truth that lies beneath the mounds of error which have destabilized the ground on which we stand. But that statement could be made by Rush Limbaugh speaking about Barak Obama in 2010. It was, in fact, directed at Richard Nixon in 1973.

How, I have learned to ask, do we know when we have settled of ‘stable ground?’ if both Herzog and Limbaugh are voicing the same sentiment coming from two completely separate and politically opposed camps? My answer is that politics only appears to lead us to ‘stable ground.’

Where Would You Put Chuck Jones?

The reaction among academics is to reduce all speech acts to politics and then to judge people according to their politics. The fact of the matter is that Chuck Jones probably wasn’t thinking in political terms at all. But let’s say that the academics are right, and that all speech is political. Let me ask the question “Where would you put Chuck Jones in such a universe?”

• Is he a liberal? He actively campaigned for the reelection of FDR in 1994 with his film Hell Bent For Election. He does propose that the Line bend himself, rather than remaining static? And he does align himself with the citified world of opera (as opposed to hick music of the banjo) in his Long Haired Hare. But he does not go far enough. In 1965, that may have been okay, but in 2010 we have progressed from sweet and innocent Ye-ye to the world of Jane Birkin.
• Is he a conservative? He doesn’t give the Line too much leeway. His shapes need to be ‘rational’ shapes, rather than ‘arbitrary squiggles.’ A reliance on reason has become the mark of someone who is too ‘square.’ And he was thinking about opera in his citified music, not rap.
• Is he a moderate? He does toe a middle line between anarchy and rigidity.

The fact of the matter is that people can decide on any one of these three answers and be satisfied with themselves. But each of these classifications—made through reason—breaks down before we come to the end of reasoning to the truth.

What’s more, the necessity of using reason means that you must take all that you like and dismiss all that you don’t like. This makes is important that, not only do you have answers, but that the opposition have not quested for answers. The proposition that your opposition fails to grasp what you have grasped puts up false—and ultimately unnecessary—boundaries in the quest for the—ultimately unreachable—truth.

It was in answer to this that the Romantics eschewed reason altogether—reason meant that you had to learn things and place them in hierarchies through the imperfect light of reason—in favor of the metaphysical and immediate sense of the self without hierarchy. This has the advantage of having everyone think that because they have quested after and found answers that they are better than their friends. The disadvantage of the Romantic model of education is that it made everybody stupid, while not providing answers that would lead anybody to a ‘solid ground’ except in their own minds. And the concern with liminal boundaries of human existence is why liberals ten towards policies of destruction and revolution until they can end history as it was always supposed to be.

This is why conservatives embrace reason. It provides a ground on which they can build their uni-directional fantasies in a multi-polar and multi-directional world.

Conclusion

Things shift; times change; and with the shifting times, culture changes. Both sides of the American political debate are committed to an absolute vision of reality in which each side believes that they have access to the truth that is denied to their opponents. My thinking is that the liberals have thrown too much of reason away in their pursuit of absolute. I think that conservatives have restricted their pursuit too much by limiting acceptable art in their pursuit of an absolute truth.

And I still love Chuck Jones. He was a great artist who was toiling away in a medium which, at the time, no one thought was artistic at all. His position has changed in that respect: we now acknowledge him as one of the great artist of the 20th century. I can forgive him for not having grasped the final truth of things after which time and history will come to a standstill at last.

So here’s my last tribute to Chuck Jones: it’s a piece called What’s Opera, Doc?, but is commonly called Kill the Wabbit. It is a parody of Wagner’s Ring:

Brilliant!

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 10, 2010

I found this on the the Internet today. It’s a question to Michael Berube, future President of the MLA (the organization for bigwigs in language and literature) and author of a book about the sad, sad state of the job market, Employment of English, about whether he or she should go to graduate school or look for another profession. Berube had written that the situation looked bleak for employment in 1997. In 2010, it looks positively abominable.

Several respondents told the student that grad school is an important and thought-provoking exercise, and advised him/her to go. That is in line with my experience with graduate students giving other potential graduate students advice.

I have replied to this thread, saying that his/her options are not limited to newspaper work, lawyering, and grad school. I pointed him back here for more detailed instructions as to how I got over my grad school experience.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, here’s my initial response to a student being asked about whether he should go to graduate school or should pay off his enormous ($250K) debt. My academically-trained colleagues gave him the advice to try graduate school. I had a different response.

• My Letter to A Hopelessly In Debt Student

And here’s some advice on how I got started in the world of business.

• Business Advice

And more importantly, here’s what I learned in business that I could have never learned in academia:

• Tales Told Out of School

My view is a different one. Although I learned long ago that nobody listens to me, I keep trying anyway.

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 8, 2010

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 6, 2010

…and I’m still traumatized. The good stuff starts at 0:55 and continues through 1:20 or so.

What was wrong with my teachers?

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Posted By WilliamHeise on July 5, 2010

Okay so I tried to fulfill promises I made during the second week of June, and I failed. So I decided that I would get the last two promises I made to my readers fulfilled in the month of June. And once again, I failed. So the lesson for me is not to promise anything in advance. And the lesson for you is not to take me seriously when I promise things.

This week, I promise to get June’s stuff out of the way in preparation for July’s stuff.

This is my homage to Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, a piece of performance art that was way ahead of its time. Here is a picture of it in performance:

What’s Going On Here?

The whole performance is outlined by Wikipedia:

In her performance, Schneemann entered wrapped in a sheet, under which she wore an apron. She disrobed and then got on a table where she outlined her body with dark paint. Several times, she would take “action poses”, similar to those in figure drawing classes. Concurrently, she read from her book Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter. Following this, she dropped the book and slowly extracted from her vagina a scroll from which she read.

Is He Serious?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘That’s art? No way.” (Admit it, that’s what you were thinking). And, yes, I’m serious.

Her Work in the 60s

The Wikipedia article continues with some (much needed) context:

Schneemann’s feminist scroll speech, according to performance theorist Jeanie Forte, made it seem as if “[Schneemann]’s vagina itself is reporting [...] sexism”.

This was in line with Schneemann’s intentions. We can see this if we look at her early career as an artist. Once again, Wikipedia will have to do:

Carolee Schneemann began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s. Her painting work began to adopt some of the characteristics of Neo-Dada art, as she used box structures coupled with expressionist brushwork. These constructs share the heavily textural characteristics found in the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg, as you probably know, was one of the artists “who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.” But Schneemann found the atmosphere troubling.

Schneemann described the atmosphere in the art community at this time as misogynistic and that female artists of the time were not aware of their bodies. These works integrated influence by artists such as Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up by the abstract expressionists. Schneemann chose to focus on expressiveness in her art rather than accessibility or stylishness. She still described herself as a formalist however, unlike other feminist artists who wanted to distance themselves from male-oriented art history.

She used her unique combination of (masculine) Formalism and her focus on her (feminine) body and changed her field from painting to abstract art.

Schneemann became involved with the art movement of happenings when she organized A Journey through a Disrupted Landscape, inviting people to “crawl, climb, negotiate rocks, climb, walk, go through mud”.

In 1964, she performed Meat Joy, a work that “revolved around eight partially nude figures dancing and playing with various objects and substances including wet paint, sausage, raw fish, scraps of paper, and raw chickens.” As a side note, the first book of hers that came to my attention was More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings. It was in the late 1980s, when I just beginning my work in graduate school. It was at this point that I wrote the first draft of my first work of fiction. I based one of my characters on a composite of Carolee Schneemann, as well as several other artists.

Art in the 70s

Inclusion was one of the themes that had been inherited from the aesthetic thought that went back to the Romantics, and Carolee felt that art had left the body—the domain of the feminine—for a sense of abstract intellectualism—a traditional domain of the masculine. Her Interior Scroll is based on her desire to have an art based, not in her head, as was the minimalist and conceptual art in which she had been trained, but in her body. The intellectual approach to art were, in her mind, masculine overtones layered onto a bi-gendered world. They were not necessary conditions of art or artists, but a byproduct of a masculine orientation to art.

As a result, Carolee was able to ‘recenter’ her art on her body, and this revealed the contradictions in society. Don’t just take my word for it. Read it here for yourselves.

I pay attention to the direction of unconscious information. There has always been something irrepressible in my work. I believe in the pure thrust of intuition, trust of the body. Putting my body in a central position in my art reveals contradictions in our culture. I resist social, erotic and aesthetic restraints, and have opened my energies to finding materials and forms which celebrate and transcend predicted directions of the work.

The sense that she is seeking transcendence, not through reason but through intuition, in her work is also one of those Romantic moments in aesthetics that I find less-than-satisfying. I am not alone. Once again, here’s Wikipedia:

Art critic Robert C. Morgan states that it is necessary to acknowledge the period during which Interior Scroll was produced in order to understand it. He argues that by placing the source of artistic creativity at the female genitals, Schneemann is changing the masculine overtones of minimalist art and conceptual art into a feminist exploration of her body.

Why Morgan’s Statement Is So Devastating To Schneemann’s Intentions

She had resisted reason and order for an intuitive free expression as the way to the transcendental, but the critic Morgan has imposed a rational, hierarchical order on her transcendental experience through the experience of history. The critic can see what (apparently) the artist cannot. Carolee has fallen into the trap of believing that because she can imagine something in her mind that she is reflecting the world as it is. But, as I have tried to show, just because we can lay claim to insight a true into our human experience, that does not give us the right to impose order on the rest of the world. In such an Enlightened world, I always seem to be on the other side. My own preference is to break the Enlightenment’s secure hold on thought.

That recognition that her upward ascent is problematic doesn’t stop her horizontal progress forward. As Wikipedia notes,

Interior Scroll, along with Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, helped pioneer many of the ideas later popularized by the off-broadway show The Vagina Monologues.

Schneemann’s Aim

Carolee used her cat, Kitsch, in her art, and we can learn things about her approach to art through Kitsch:

Her cat Kitsch, which was featured in works such as Fuses (1967) and Kitch’s Last Meal (1978), was a major figure in Schneemann’s work for almost twenty years. She used Kitch as an “objective” observer to her and Tenney’s sexual activities, as she stated that she was unaffected by human mores.

She escapes the artificial mores of the human condition in order to get back to her ‘natural’ condition, just like the Apemen. By using an animal observer, she can claim that she has transcended to male-female expression and traveled to a transcendental world beyond gender-imposed boundaries. Her body disappears even as she is fronting her body in her art.

But a quick glance at Wikipedia will reveal that Carolee’s human content, which she attempted to overcome by the use of the posture of her cat as an objective observer, was powerfully sexual.

In 1964, Schneemann began production of her film Fuses, eventually finishing it in 1967. Fuses portrayed Schneemann and her then-boyfriend James Tenney having sex as recorded by a 16 mm Bolex camera. Schneemann then altered the film by staining, burning, and directly drawing on the celluloid itself, mixing the concepts of painting and collage. The segments were edited together at varying speeds and superimposed with photographs of nature, which she juxtaposed against her and Tenney’s bodies and sexual actions.

Note the intervening process of nature in the film. The work of art is taken out of nature, mixed together at varying speeds, and then put back together again, Humpty-Dumpty-like.

Fuses was motivated by Schneemann’s desire to know if a woman’s depiction of her own sexual acts was different from pornography and classical art, as well as a reaction to Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving. She showed the film to her contemporaries as she worked on it in 1965 and 1966, receiving mostly positive feedback from her peers.

The Disappearance of the Body

The problem for an artist like Carolee Schneemann is that the artist must control, not only her free expression, but also the reaction of the critics. And many critics didn’t cooperate, seeing her work differently than she did herself:

Many critics though described it as “narcissistic exhibitionism” and described it as self-indulgent. She received an especially strong reaction regarding the cunnilingus scene of the film.

It’s understandable that Carolee wouldn’t want the artificial human construct of viewing woman as an object of sexual attraction to interfere with her artwork, which pointed to a higher level than the merely human. But how she can say that her transcendental posture is more human than her sexual expression is beyond me. It seems more likely that by ignoring the role of reason in her life that she has left out one of the more prominent pieces of the experience of being human. The neglect of reason causes her to try and transcend through intuition the same veil that reason had failed to transcend during the Enlightenment. And she fails, as well.

But perhaps I’m wrong:

While Fuses is viewed as a “proto-feminist” film, Schneemann feels that it was largely neglected by feminist film historians. The film lacked the fetishism and objectification of the female body as seen in much male-oriented pornography. Two years after its completion, it won a Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Selection prize.

My Argument With Schneemann’s Work

I think, however, that the fact that she can find consumers of art who are willing to overlook her bare body as a sexual symbol in favor of its asexual content as a provider of human meaning (a la the Greek idea of the body), that doesn’t make me forget what I’m looking at in Carolee’s work.

Her valuation of those who are willing to overlook her body for the intellectual content of her work represents the orientation (in my experience) of the entire artistic community, which is based on the notion that there are insiders and outsiders in the world of art. Most people are outsiders, but the select few (those agree to allow Carolee to control their perspective on her art) are allowed to participate from within. To the rest of us, they look like the minions in the children’s story who don’t point out the most obvious fact about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

This is a question that art and artists have raised time and time again (and will continue to raise in the future). That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy her work. I enjoy all sorts of art that doesn’t completely close around the questions that they raise in my lowly head. I’m not a conservative who feels the need to denounce what is challenging, different, and very sexual in favor of ‘our’ (if you’re a liberal, I mean to say ‘their’) ideas of transcendental human, asexual beauty.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m willing to overlook the sexual content of Schneemann’s work of art, as she herself would have us do. In fact, I sort of like looking at it, just like I like looking at Louise Brooks’ body. And thus, I am not a liberal, for whom the temptations of the body must be suppressed, even as the body is fronted in the search for ‘our’ sense of transcendental beauty (if you’re a conservative, I meant to say ‘their’).

Back To Louise

My argument with Carolee Schneemann is essentially the same argument I have with the German director Pabst. As you will recall, Pabst had a problem with Louise Brooks. He was an intellectual, and she was not. She was actually living her life, and Pabst was outraged the she wasn’t acting her part in his film. She was living it. The only legitimate posture, in Pabst’s mind, was to live your live at an ironic distance. This idea travels through T. S. Eliot and Yeats right up to Creed’s video, Higher.

This intellectual approach is widespread in modern and postmodern art. It is used to divide the in-the-knowers from the outsiders, who fail to reach the only proper perspective of art (that which is dictated by the artists themselves). I think it’s wrong to approach life from a distance. I think it’s problematic for artists to force us all to look at art through a perspective which the artist controls. That perspective is itself artificial, and rings false. Moreover, (and once again, I would point you to my experience in grad school) it breeds isolation from others, rather than common purpose by requiring that people evaluate others for their inside or outside qualities on a political level before getting to know them as individuals.

The intellectual approach to art fails to connect with life as we live it. In particular, the intellectual approach forgoes death and aging, which all men must pass through. Look at Louise Brooks. She got old, and then she died. We wouldn’t want to watch her playing Lulu at 70 (or after she was dead), would we? (For those of you who would answer ‘yes,’ I will answer the question for you. The answer is ‘no.’)

The same thing holds true of Carolee Schneemann. Her attempt at transcending her body through her body was an attempt to transcend the veil of time itself, while bringing her body along with her. And this is why she thinks she can lord her power over the ‘little people’ who react to her art as if she was having sex in public for public consumption. ‘Nothing,’ she would say, ‘could be farther from the truth.’ To admit anything else would involve her in those artificial ‘human mores’ which she was determined to erase by ignoring them. She might be ashamed if she thought that there was any reason other than ‘artifice’ (like, you know, public morals, decorum, decency, etc.) that human beings adhere to rules. But she has transcended those artificial moral boundaries, as she chases more ‘natural’ boundaries.

But watching her have sex at 70 is not the same as watching her have sex at 25 (through the animal intermediary of Kitsch) in her film Fuses. Unlike Louise Brooks, who went into retirement after her career as a young, spoiled starlet waned, Carolee might just continue and have sex with someone on film. But I think the issue goes deeper than her not being young. I believe that the issue springs from her construction of the problem she has set herself. She wants to recreate the perfect view of the world that the Enlightenment had promised her. When the Enlightenment burned out over the inability of reason to climb the metaphysical heights, the Romantic period saved the metaphysical by traveling to the animal instinct.

Both ignored to a large extent the role of time in human existence.

In ignoring time for the transcendent experience of art, she has crossed over, as many artists have crossed over before her (and will again, I am sure), out of her human experience to an experience that is reserved for gods and beasts, who (after Aristotle, who said ‘But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.’) confront nature directly, rather than through an artificial, constructed, and humanly-created society.

But she survives, and she has recently made a video explaining what she thinks she was doing in her feminist art. And it’s worth watching if for no other reason than that we (okay, I) don’t want to go back to ‘what the city used to be like.’

And here it (and she) is:

A Few Last Things

Here’s a few images for you to think about when you are thinking about whether I am right to like Carolee Schneemann’s work on the Interior Scroll (which I do). She not only produced a work of art out of her vagina; she saved it. And now it’s in a museum somewhere:

And, in case you’re still doubting that this is a famous piece of artwork and not just something that appeals to me personally, take a look at this reproduction of Carolee Schneemann’s Interior scroll (found here).

And that’s what I have to say about that.

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