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Friday, September 17, 2004

Tom Frank:  the prequel

If I were doing my Josh Marshall impersonation, I would say, I’m on a story about Tom Frank.  Check back later.

So, anyway, I’m on a story about Tom Frank.  Check back later.

In the meantime, let me refer you all to my review essay on Frank’s previous book, One Market Under God (3000 words, just right for weekend reading), the final third of which gets around to addressing some of the stupidities Frank attributes to “cultural studies” people (including me, in a small supporting role!).

Then let me say that I think that Tom Frank is an exceptionally talented writer-- witty, versatile, whip-smart-- and that I’m glad he’s on our side.  And What’s the Matter with Kansas? is a better book than One Market, not least for its willingness to explore the fact that some people really are motivated more by (ahem) merely cultural issues than by economic self-interest.  But (this is where the “but” traditionally comes in paragraphs like this) I find myself puzzled at passages like these:

So it is with Sam Brownback right down the line: a man of sterling public principle, he seems to take the side of corporate interests almost regardless of the issue at hand.  This is true even when the corporate interests in question are industries whose products Brownback considers the source of all evil.  Such, at least, was the case in 2003, when one of Brownback’s Senate committees was called upon to consider the growing problem of monopoly ownership in radio since the industry’s deregulation seven years previously.  Brownback, of course, has made a career out of denouncing the culture industry for its vulgarity, its bad values, presumably for the damage it has done to America’s soul.  Taking this opportunity to rein it in should have been a no-brainer.  After all, as the industry critic Robert McChesney points out, the link between media ownership, the drive for profit, and the media’s insulting content should be obvious to anyone with ears to hear.  “Vulgarity is linked to corporate control and highly concentrated, only semi-competitive markets,” McChesney says.  And for many conservatives, “the radio fight was the moment of truth.  If people are seriously concerned about vulgarity, this was their chance to prove it.” (74-75)

Frank returns to this theme in the closing pages of the book:

Behold the political alignment that Kansas is pioneering for us all. The corporate world-- for reasons having a great deal to do with its corporateness-- blankets the nation with a cultural style designed to offend and to pretend-subvert: sassy teens in Skechers flout the Man; bigoted churchgoing moms don’t tolerate their daughters’ cool liberated friends; hipsters dressed in T-shirts reading “FCUK” snicker at the suits who just don’t get it.  It’s meant to be offensive, and Kansas is duly offended.  The state watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year.  Kansas aches for revenge.  Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail.  And when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire.  Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite.  Kansas comes running to the polling place.  And Kansas cuts those rock stars’ taxes.  (249)

In fact, Frank concludes, cultural backlash and corporate vulgarity “feed off of each other in a kind of inverted symbiosis. . . .  All the incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of modern capitalism.  Why shouldn’t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?” (249-50)

Frank then summarized this line of argument in his Salon interview with Andrew O’Hehir this past summer:

You have a whole critique of pop culture that is difficult to summarize, but let’s talk more about your sympathy with the right-wing activists. When they bemoan how coarse and cheap pop culture has become, you almost seem to agree, or at least to feel that they have a certain kind of point.

Well, look. I should say this: I started out as a punk rocker, and we try to deal with cultural dissent, genuinely shocking things, at the Baffler. But as I have written about many, many times, so much of the shockery that surrounds us is not genuine. There’s no avant-garde about it. It’s not the real thing, it’s a watered-down capitalist projection. You’ve seen this argument before, “the commodification of dissent.”

The argument I’m making is not that they’re absolutely right to be disgusted by our culture—although when I’m away from the country and I come back and turn on MTV, I’m always like, “Holy shit!” I’m just trying to play up the flagrant contradiction. If you hate this stuff, talk about capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it! I’m focusing on the contradiction there, rather than accepting their argument about obscenity or whatever.

Right, so your real problem is with the kind of cultural-studies intellectual who believes that pop culture really is subversive.

Yes, exactly. The cultural studies people read these products of capitalism as face value. They see fake rebellion as the real thing. To put it in very vulgar terms, that’s the argument.

Madonna kissing Britney is somehow actually socially meaningful.

Right, exactly. And the heartland people often see it that way also. I’m saying it’s not that, it is as pure an expression of business rationality as is a McDonald’s hamburger.

When I get back from Binghamton, I promise this time, I’ll explain why I think there are two things very, very wrong with this.  And I also promise that I won’t say any stupid “cultural studies” things about how pop culture is subversive! 

In the meantime, check out this Salon essay on the “Jersey girls.” See you soon.

ADDENDUM:  It turns out there are a few weird features in that online version of my review of One Market Under God-- erratic italicization (both of Frank’s prose and mine), and a terrible typo ("tweedy, Moynihan-liberal elders whom DJ the Mozart show on public radio every second Sunday"--!!) that wasn’t there in the print version (or, I assure you, in my manuscript).  Do not pay any attention to these minor textual anomalies.  They do not suggest that the essay is a forgery.

Posted by Michael on 09/17 at 01:16 AM
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Thursday, September 16, 2004

And by the way

It just so happens that Jamie is thirteen years old today.  Happy birthday, Jamie!

Posted by Michael on 09/16 at 05:27 AM
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From the muted post-horn mailbag

I got the coolest letter from the Kerry people yesterday!  Or at least I think I did.  It‚Äôs hard to tell these days with all these simulacra and forgeries floating around out there.

Dear Michael B?©rub?©:

Thank you for not giving us any unsolicited campaign advice.  We‚Äôre having a hard enough time as it is, trying to stay focused on jobs and health care while Iraq descends inexorably into the abyss.

But in all honesty, we have to say that your blog hasn‚Äôt really been helping lately.  We liked your RNC coverage, but since then, your deliberate post-convention confounding of ‚Äúoriginals‚Äù and ‚Äúparodies‚Äù has left many voters confused, and your strange Mobius-strip exchange with Tristero seems to have eerily anticipated the Killian memo phenomenon, in which ‚Äúthe real‚Äù is dissolved in a bubbling vat of textuality only to appear again in the form of a forgery that tells the truth.  It‚Äôs hard, amidst all this nonsense, to keep people focused on the fact that George Bush is the worst president since James Garfield fell into that coma.  (Actually many of us would prefer Garfield-in-a-coma.  But we can‚Äôt very well say that on the stump.)

Moreover, we believe that your literary/theoretical allusions are costing us critical support among undecided voters.  Not because they‚Äôre postmodern and/or poststructuralist, but because they are finally incoherent.  One day it‚Äôs Pynchon and Derrida, the next day it‚Äôs Borges and Baudrillard, the day after that it‚Äôs Nabokov and a smirking reference to Scooby-Doo Where Are You? And what‚Äôs all this business about show tunes?  Is that a reference to Trent Duffy‚Äôs explanation of Bush‚Äôs bicycle accident this summer ("suffice it to say he wasn’t whistling show tunes")?  Our internal polling suggests that this eclectic post-something blog-soup has cost us six points in Ohio and another four in Wisconsin.  Please, for the sake of the party, knock off this silliness and get back to your often-promised, never-delivered entry on Tom Frank.

Sincerely yours,

The Kerry People

Well, of course I‚Äôm very sorry to have contributed to the general confusion.  I‚Äôm writing that take on What‚Äôs the Matter with Kansas? this week, and right now it‚Äôs part of a talk I‚Äôm going to deliver at Binghamton University next Monday, so I can‚Äôt post it ‚Äòtil I get back from Binghamton‚Äì just in case I have any readers in Binghamton who‚Äôll show up to my talk and say, ‚Äúthis stuff again?  Why did we come to see you speak if you‚Äôre just going to repeat the things you say on your blog?‚Äù

More importantly, the Kerry people have a point about my incoherence.  Internal theoretical consistency has never been my strong suit!  So I think I should open this question to the floor, or whatever passes for the floor in the blogosphere.  It’s time for another Reader Poll!

The Swift Boat Vet/ Killian memo phase of the 2004 campaign is best captured by the figure of:

___ Borges
___ Kafka
___ Pynchon
___ Baudrillard
___ Nabokov
___ Scooby-Doo
___ Derrida
___ Lee Atwater (note that one of the minor titles in the Jerome Kern songbook is “Good Old Atwater”!)
___ I don’t know and I don’t care– in fact, I’m not even sure I want Kerry to inherit the debacle that will face a U.S. president in 2005, and I’m hanging on only because I cannot bear to contemplate a Supreme Court made up of Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen, and Tomas de Torquemada.
___ Are you ever going to say anything about the NHL lockout?

Over to you, folks.

UPDATE:  In comments, Tim mentions “forged memos that are true and real memories that are false.” Which reminds me-- what about Philip K. Dick?  Some people have lately informed me that the United States now has an android television network that simulates an actual news network, with simulacra of “journalists” and “analysts” who are indistinguishable from real journalists and analysts except by means of the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test (and even then, Voigt-Kampff has an accuracy rate below 70 percent).  This sounds too much like the alternate police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so I haven’t paid much attention to these people.  But could it be true?

Posted by Michael on 09/16 at 01:50 AM
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Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Crucial advice for John Kerry

Listen, big guy, you’ve got to stop listening to advice!*

And all you self-appointed Kerry advisors . . . go read Digby today and get your game face on.

I know it’s frustrating.  Some of us desperately wish that our fair country was also a sane country (or a simulacrum of one!  I’m working on it!), like one of those many industrialized nations in which support for Kerry over Bush runs about 85-15 . . . and in which the spectacle of the Republican convention would’ve dropped Bush’s support from 15 percent to 6.  Or we desperately wish that we could have Jon Stewart step in to debate Bush, just once (partly to see W. react to Jon’s summary of his campaign:  “he drove us into a wall-- but hey, he didn’t blink!").  Or we wish that the other party wasn’t controlled by a consortium of mullahs, kleptocrats, and sociopaths who lie with every utterance and sometimes even with random grunts, gestures, and snores. Well, it would be nice.  Maybe next time!  But right now we have to pull the good old U. S. of A. back from the precipice, even if almost half our fellow citizens will despise us for it.  So don’t waste time in kvetching-- organize.

* Except for unsolicited advice from other hockey players, of course.

Posted by Michael on 09/15 at 01:59 AM
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Conference report

Thanks, everyone, for your patience with this new site.  I’m sorry about the formatting problems with the posts in the archive—for some reason, Expression Engine reads dashes as question marks and ?’s not at all.  But I don’t have the time right now to go back and fix every one of 250+ posts to this thing.  So I appreciate your patience.

Thanks also for filling me in on the events of the past few days.  But how come nobody asks me how my weekend went?  A conference on “Blogging and Forgery,” hell, you’d think that would be a hot topic around these parts . . . but I suppose you all think that an academic conference is just wall-to-wall jargon punctuated by “questions” that are really comments.

Let me assure you that this conference was different.  Some of you might even have enjoyed it.  It was held on the labyrinthine campus of the University of Tlön and co-sponsored by the International Kerning Society, which was holding its gala fiftieth annual convention in the same hotel.  I can already hear some of you snickering: the International Kerning Society, my ass, you say, they didn’t even have kerning in 1954, so there’s no way they could have a “gala fiftieth annual convention” today. Well, my smug imaginary-interlocutor insta-specialists, you would be wrong.  The International Kerning Society was originally founded to ensure that the music and lyrics of famous Broadway songwriters would be transcribed and archived in both pica and space-proportional fonts, so that there would be no doubt about their authenticity in the decades to come.  The Society has recently been in the news, what with all the speculation that certain officers in the Texas Air National Guard, who were apparently also aficionados of Broadway show tunes (though their families deny this), ordered and used the very same IBM typewriters favored by the Kerning Society for their archival project.  Well, let me put some of that speculation to rest if I can.

The day I arrived at the conference, happily enough, was the very day that an anonymous Freeper apparently—and I stress apparently—created a computer-generated facsimile of the so-called “Killian memos,” thus launching the now-widely-circulated charge that the memos were forgeries.  Terrified that I might have to rewrite my own paper on “Simulation and Simulacra: The Indeterminacy of the Text in the Age of Electronic Transmission,” which was originally all about Tristero, the Weekly Standard, and my recent personal experience at Madison Square Garden of Forking Paths, I spoke to some people in the Kerning Society to get their take on things.

I don’t have time right now to go into all the relevant details, but here are the highlights of our conversation:

One: according to my sources, the Freepers are right about the Killian memos—more right than they know.  The “facsimile” conjured up by their anonymous contributor is not a facsimile at all—it is the original copy of one of the memos sent to CBS.  The likeliest scenario is that Karl Rove travelled back in time with Microsoft Word and composed the memos in 1972 or 1973, stored them in the Vatican Library in the folio of an obscure edition of Wharfinger’s Courier’s Tragedy, then had them mysteriously “discovered” last month and sent to CBS so as to destroy CBS’s credibility on the eve of the Ben Barnes interview on 60 Minutes.  Another theory has it that John Kerry composed the memos himself in 1968-69 on the very same IBM Executive he took to Vietnam (more on this below), and postdated them four years as part of his long-term plan to run for President against George W. Bush in 2004.  But that seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Two: the paperwork authorizing Kerry’s wartime medals consists of forgeries from start to finish.  It’s not merely that Kerry typed up the paperwork himself—the telltale initials “JKW” are the giveaway on this, precisely because they are not Kerry’s initials and are not proportionally spaced—but that the documents themselves could not possibly have been produced by anything other than WordPerfect 12, which (a) did not exist at the time and (b) which has since produced exact copies of Kerry’s alleged “after-action” reports.  Moreover (and this should be dispositive), during the period 1967-71, Kerry routinely and repeatedly forged his own signature on letters, contracts, and checks, eventually inspiring Jacques Derrida to do the same at the end of his essay “Signature Event Context.” Thus, recent right-wingers’ references to the textual machinations of “ink-stained Derrideans” are, again, more right than they know.

Three: it turns out that Iraq really did try to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger after all.  The “forgery” in that case was in fact a cleverly planted ruse, using typefaces available only in the southern Iraqi region of Uqbar and containing obvious giveaways (such as the famous opening, “DEAR SIR OR MADAM I REQUEST YOUR IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE IN HELPING ME MOVE A GREAT DEAL OF NUCLEAR MATERIAL OUT OF MY COUNTRY") that were meant to discredit US intelligence and divert world attention while Iraq sneakily sought to buy yellowcake on eBay (in order not to leave a paper trail, naturally).  In fact, some people believe this “deliberate forgery” scheme is what gave Rove the idea to travel back to the early 1970s and plant the Killian memos.  But right now there isn’t enough evidence to establish the connection, and besides, the jury is still out on those memos, as I’ve already mentioned.

Whew!  Deep breath, everyone—it’s a lot to take in at once, I know.  Still, I hope I’ve cleared up some things that have been troubling everyone lately.  Who knew that the 2004 campaign would involve so many intricate textual minutiae?  And things are just getting interesting—after all, as one of the conference speakers said in the plenary session, “The methodical fabrication of electronic texts is performing prodigious services for archaelogists.  It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.”

I hope the conference proceedings will be published soon.

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 09:31 AM
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Monday, September 13, 2004

Mysterious shadowy figures have been following me . . .

ever since I got on the plane home from this conference on “Blogging and Forgery.” I gave a paper on “Simulation and Simulacra:  The Indeterminacy of the Text in the Age of Electronic Transmission,” and the room was full of these guys in suits and sunglasses.  Weird!  Even stranger, despite the topic of the conference and the hi-speed connections in the hotel, I haven’t had access to the Internet for three days, and then I come home to find that my former website has been scrubbed completely clean of content.  Also weird!  (My apologies to the ten or twenty recent commenters we’ve lost in the migration to this new, secret site.)

So I haven’t had a chance to look at any blogs since Thursday.  Did I miss anything?

Posted by Michael on 09/13 at 07:05 AM
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