There is something rather interesting and revealing in all the recent controversies about celebrities running their mouths and acting like peabrains. You’ve heard about these controversies on the news, of course, such as Mel Gibson’s drunken diatribe against Jews, comedian Michael Richards’s racial slurs in response to being interrupted by a heckler during a disastrous nightclub comedy routine, Danny DeVito’s drunken rant against President Bush on The View yesterday, etc. That’s the Omniculture for you. Everything happens, and everything gets on TV or the Web, which is the new TV. In short, expect a lot more of this. People often act badly under stress—which is when a person’s integrity and strength of character shine through or the lack of these bursts forth. And there will always be stressful situations to endure, even for the wealthy, famous, and powerful. Hence, there will be many incidents of crummy behavior by such persons. In a society with strong democratic and egalitarian impulses and consequently little to no sense of noblesse oblige among its most privileged members, such trashy behavior is inevitable. Given that eveything happens in the Omniculture and is immediately distributed to everybody by way of TV and the Web, this will
Monthly Archives: November 2006
Can We Judge Literature?
I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?" It’s a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual’s chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it’s silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes. I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it’s true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the
Philip K. Dick Canonized
It’s official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports: Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas’s interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist’s plate: "I’m helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I’m writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select." I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded. A good many of Philip K. Dick’s books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great
Soap Opera to Feature “Transgendering” Character
This Thursday, the ABC TV daytime serial drama All My Children will introduce a character who was born male and is being "transformed into a woman" through hormone treatments, surgery, and psychological retraining. This is believed to be the first time an American television show has had such a "transgendering" character. Some programs in the past have had fully "transgendered" characters in the past, but you probably wouldn’t remember them given that nobody watched. The L Word, on the Showtime cable network, has a character who is going the other way, from a woman to a "man." According to the Associated Press, "All My Children" was looking for something new, and knows its audience is always interested in anything to do with sexuality, said Julie Hanan Carruthers, the show’s executive producer. Like most daytime dramas, the program’s ratings have been dropping, falling by almost 2/3 since the early 1990s. Pardon me for thinking that this isn’t going to improve the show’s performance.
Two More Depressing TV Shows Sink
Two more TV shows representing this season’s trend towared "darker," more depressing TV programs have been placed on "hiatus" by their network. The Nine and Six Degrees are both suspended until later in the season. ABC said that both programs will return later. Programs placed on hiatus, however, often do not return. The Nine has been temporarily replaced by a "special" edition of the magazine show 20/20 for the last day of the November "ratings sweeps" in which advertisers’ rates for TV networks are set. Both programs were part of a trend toward "darker" network TV shows, as reported earlier here and here. As I suggested in my earlier reports, this is not a good idea, and the ratings have confirmed it.
Thanksgiving Day
May you have a blessed Thanksgiving Day, and please take time to consider the great blessings that have been given to this great country, and think about the best ways to preserve and strengthen them.
Liberals and Statists
Here are some thoughts in our continuing discussion of political nomenclature, in which we have noted the changing nature of what is really conservative, radical, and liberal in the current era, after the end of the Cold War: There are two parties of left and right today: liberals and statists. Liberals see authority as vested in the individual and handed over to the state only as appropriate to maintain both order and liberty. Statists see authority as residing entirely in the state. This is the critical difference between the "social contracts" envisioned by Locke and Rousseau. True, classical liberals are very different from the people who are commonly called liberals today. The latter are statists, and they are conservative in the sense that we now live in a state-dominated realm, indeed a state-dominated civilization. True liberals treasure individual rights within a framework of social order which sustains and gives reign to those rights. I believe that this work of clarification will work to the distinct advantage of the true, classical liberals. The left, the statists, live on deception, as Orwell noted. Liberals live on truth. I think that if we understand things in those terms and communicate them to people
Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction
Two time travel movies are premiering today, and a none of those astounding mysteries of the universe that Hollywood creates every couple of months. Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (directed with his usual great skill and creativity) is the bigger-budgeted and promoted film, and will probably do well at the box office. Darren Arnofsky’s The Fountain promises to be a bit quirkier and probably won’t make as much money but might obtain more critical accolades. Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can’t say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality. I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we’ve all experienced things that
Why Radio Stinks
If you find current-day FM radio to be extremely boring, as I do, you can credit Clear Channel Communications for a lot of it. They’re the corporate giant that bought over 1,100 radio stations all over the dial over the past couple of decades and standardized the U.S. radio airwaves. Clear Channel imposed strict programming formats, limited set lists, automated DJs, little local flavor, and more commercials, except in the case of the inane, vulgar drivetime programs of comedy-team DJs telling dirty jokes, which likewise became very annoying very quickly. (And these programs had, if anything, even more commercials.) As should not surprise anyone, listeners ultimately tired of the removal of all creativity, fun, and charm from music radio and switched to satellite systems, portable music devices, and the like. And the market has done its magic: Clear Channel’s stock has fallen by two-thirds since the beginning of the year 2000. Now Clear Channel has agreed to be sold to an investment group in one of the largest corporate buyouts ever. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the new owners (if the deal goes through as planned) will remedy the real problems Clear Channel has created, by overturning
“Prime Suspect” Ends
The PBS/BBC police procedural series Prime Suspect premiered in 1991 and began the still-current run of dreary, depressing TV cop shows on both sides of the pond. All of the now-familiar elements were there: sliimy urban streets; an obsession with the seamy side of life; strange and disturbed criminals; a depressed lead detective with an unhappy or nonexistent home life; heavy-handed ironies; a central character’s struggle with addiction or some other nagging personal problem; a police team that fights its bosses and one another almost as much as it fights crooks; an unfair, inefficient, and corrupt police force; and on and drearily on To be sure, Helen Mirren did a great job of making Det. Supt. Jane Tennison seem real, if not particularly interesting. And like Mirren’s characterization, the show’s allegedly greater realism than the average run of TV cop shows was actually more of a superficial thing. Yes, it is true that Mirren’s choice not to smile and decision to keep her hair short do reflect some concerns of real-life policewomen—they are reluctant to smile while on duty, she has observed, because it can too easily be perceived as weakness, and they keep their hair short or restrain it
Casino Royale
Ian Fleming’s James Bond is a much tougher egg than most of the Bond movies have portrayed him to be. Sure, he does impossible stunts and kills lots of villains, but he’s always cracking smart jokes, hardly breaking a sweat, and knows way too much about fancy drinks and what upper-crust people like to say at parties. That was a big part of Ian Fleming’s conception of the Bond books, of course, but at heart Bond was something of a thug—more Bulldog Drummond than a Dornford Yates smart-set spy. And that’s where the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, finds its inspiration. Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, is much more of a bulldog than the Bonds of the past, and the action sequences in this installment, though about as ludicrous as in most Bond films, have a gritty character that matches Craig’s roughness and fits well with the current trend in action films. The opening credits and initial scenes make this very clear: the credits sequence is all stylized images of violence, and none of the naked women reflected in shimmering water that have characterized the Bond series over the years. And the first scenes take up this motif,
Milton Friedman
I have just heard that the economist Milton Friedman died this morning at the age of 94. Dr. Friedman was one of the great economists of the last century, and his wise counsel of economic matters will be greatly missed. He was the author who perhaps most greatly strengthened my interest in the value of free markets and freedom of choice in societies. In books such as Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (written with his wife, Rose), Friedman consistently championed free-market capitalism in an era when statism was the norm. His ideas truly changed the world, as Ronald Reagan initiated a turn to free-market economics in the United States that was picked up in countless other nations and is still strong. Friedman was a superb economist, a brilliant and independent thinker, and an inspiring intellectual leader. Please click here to find his books and read the works of this great thinker and brilliant communicator.
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