It Was Never About Experience. This Election Is About Elitism
On NRO’s the Corner, Victor Davis Hanson’s answer to the question “Why Do We Like Palin?” pretty much nails exactly why Sarah Palin is the most polarizing candidate we’ve seen in the election so far (Yes, more so than HRC.)
Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama’s America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry’s United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.
So along comes someone (unlike Biden’s vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.
Palin’s symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin’s atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it’s a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, “community organizing” and the can’t-do, ‘they raised the bar on me’ collective complaint.
If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.
So apparently they are eager to see a rare politican who is unapologetic about America’s past achievements (cf. Obama’s “tragic history” and need for more “oppression studies”), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.
Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden—and many who are criticizing her don’t have a clue why that it is so.
Well I know why I’m criticizing her, and that is because I’m a libertarian and I remember the election of 2000. Her “reforming” political views and “down-to-earth” “symbolism” only remind me of George W. Bush in his first run for president. Naturally, it wasn’t the huntin’ and fishin’ that won over independents/libertarians, but his platform on limited government, free trade, and non-interventionist foreign policy. When you think about it, Bush in 2000 sounded a lot more like Ron Paul than John McCain today. From a libertarian’s perspective now, the worst thing Democrats can do is raise taxes. But I can’t even conceive of the worst possible Republican actions because the party has consistently gone beyond my most cynical expectations.
Foreign policy is the president’s direct responsibility, the economy is mostly out of his hands (Not that they’re unrelated: a hugely expensive war doesn’t help things.) Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Do you really believe that Sarah Palin understands the distinctions between Shia and Sunni, has an opinion about the future of Pakistan, has a view of how to exploit rifts within Tehran’s leadership, knows about the tricky task of securing loose nuclear weapons? Does anyone even know if she has ever expressed a view on these matters?”
I don’t fear Palin is the female Quayle but potentially the female GWB: a weak leader nevertheless capable of getting elected for the likability factor, falling under the influence of the people surrounding her while moving up the ranks. Remember, Bush had “executive experience” as a governor of Texas before the presidency. And they share a speechwriter.
From the Washington Post: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis “suggest Palin would be able to handle foreign policy matters by leaning heavily on McCain’s staff.” You aren’t electing a person, you’re electing a party.
While much is made about her lack of “experience” canceling out Obama’s, now the Palin pick finally makes sense: this election is about “elitism.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.”
Class in our country isn’t well examined or understood, mostly as the division has much to do with race relations. And that makes Obama’s “elite” status so bizarre given his race and upbringing.
To the GOP, “elite” has nothing to do with money or race. It has to do with “values.” “Elite” is any social liberal. Which is why the left badly needs to reframe this debate and claim its side of the culture war as reasoned, principled, logical, honorable, any word other than something suggesting the result of a college education.
It all comes back to Karl Rove’s remark, “Even if you never met him, you know this guy… He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
As Jon Stewart put it, “Doesn’t elite mean good?…This job you’re applying for — if you get it, and it goes well, they might carve your head in a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us than what the fuck are you doing?”
(BTW, if I had Photoshop on this computer I’d impose Palin and McCain’s faces on Grant Wood’s painting. And oh, maybe mash-up Cindy McCain and Marie-Antoinette.)
Update 9/4/08: More Sarah Palin 2008 = George W. Bush 2000 articles now. Sarah Palin’s real soul mate in Salon and George W. Palin in Huffington Post
Previously:
Boris Johnson isn’t London’s New Bicycle
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
Related links:
- It’s an Election, Not a Revolution, Tyler Cowen in NYT
- Book: The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard
- Don’t LOL. Palin Pick Is About Taking On Washington — Not About Gender, Joe Trippi
- Liberty Island, The American Prospect
- President Camacho Speech from Idiocracy
- The View on Palin from an Alaskan Anti-Real ID Activist and Democrat, Reason
Women’s Office Fashions: From Holloway’s Wiggle Dress to Hillary’s Pantsuit
To all the men out there who think a female’s obsession with fashion is merely superficial: perhaps you aren’t properly applying your “spatial knowledge.” What do you think happens when a straight pant leg is pulled up over a curved hip? Or a standard dress shirt is buttoned over breasts? That these proportions widely vary from woman to woman creates even more difficulty.
Right now I’m shopping for business meeting appropriate clothing and it’s a bother. Plus, I’m a head taller than the average woman so inseam measurements are just another way could-look-good outfits end up back on the floor. The alternative to looking like Joan Holloway is looking like a linebacker. Unfortunately, I’ll likely need to go with the latter, until I’ve saved enough for a good tailor. (”Getting things tailored,” as women’s magazines are always so quick to suggest, comes at a cost of at least $50 per item. In the end it may be cheaper to fly to Southeast Asia and back for a few bespoke suits.)
I love Mad Men as much as the next blogger, but one aspect of it I haven’t seen discussed is the relationship between Peggy and the rest of the women at Sterling-Cooper. Prior to watching the show, I thought of the women’s struggle in the workforce as a problem perpetuated by male bosses. But Mad Men demonstrates just as much tension comes from the other women, who, either jealous or comfortable with the status quo, don’t want to see Peggy get ahead. Secretaries wield an enormous amount of power in office politics.
I’m probably reading too much into this, but we could think of Peggy’s choice of clothing as a reaction to this dynamic. Dressing in baggy clothes and muted colors, she is not just less attractive to the men at the office, but less competition to the women.
But does Joan Holloway really dress cheap? Or is she just dressing for her figure? Apart from the obvious use of certain undergarments as enhancement, Joan’s outfits are modest. See any of her dresses on a rack and they’d seem appropriate for Sunday’s sermon.
And they were. Women back then wore outfits cut specifically for rounder figures. That’s partly why the argument over Marilyn Monroe’s size is specious. Vanity sizing is real, and even at her heaviest there’s no way she’d be a size 14 by today’s standards. But with that hourglass figure there’s also no way she’d fit in a contemporary size 4. Marilyn Monroe could probably borrow Scarlett Johansson’ bespoke 6/00 hybrid clothes.
Young women are sometimes advised by female mentors to wear sports bras to interviews because studies show leaner women tend to get hired more often in positions in power. So it is unlikely we’ll ever see a return to the Joan Holloway “wiggle dress” in corporate offices. Yet, those dresses cover just as much skin as contemporary A-line skirt and sweater-set coordinates. People continue to conflate a full figure with a sexually available figure. What many office women are doing is exactly what a 13 year old who wears baggy sweatshirts to school does: they are hiding their bodies to disguise their sexuality, and ward off comments. No matter how many manuals and SOPs are drafted, sexual harassment is sadly very common.
The view that Joan looks “slutty” plays into the backward fantasy that a voluptuous figure is built to be played with, and something to be ashamed of if one wants to be taken seriously in the workforce. Now we wouldn’t ask a Kate Moss lookalike to veil her face. And certainly there are those who prefer a straighter figure (whether they are attracted to what a lithe female form signals is a whole other story.) But to look at it as a whole, if the ideal image of a office worker is a man in a man’s suit, than a female employee will never look ideal.
The main issue here is the fit. The comfort level. Clothing that fits a curvy figure also happens to enhance it. Clothing that does not properly fit will hide a woman’s figure. Half a century later, trends in clothing for professional women have borrowed straight lines from menswear, although women’s bodies haven’t evolved that way. Unless a woman has unusually straight proportions, a suit, whether Prada or H+M, won’t ever look quite right. I don’t hate my body in jeans. I don’t hate it in a bikini. But I hate my body in a pantsuit. It’s uncomfortable. I feel like I’m swimming in fabric.
The turning point was in the 80s with Working Girl defining the look. The fashions were Picasso-like in their abstractions of the female form. The shoulders were exaggerated and coats were cut long like dresses. It was confusion masquerading as confidence.
But contemporary women’s office dress didn’t change much once the shoulder pads were removed. If anything changed at all it was the introduction of rainbow colors, like the pantone chart that is Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit collection.
For her presidential campaign, Clinton needed to signal her authority “while conforming to an electably conservative presentation of gender,” as Kerry Howley explained in Reason last year. “Clinton’s struggle to find an aesthetic language and a politically amenable identity can come across as inauthentic—fashion flip-flopping. Witness the easter egg-colored pantsuit, a crude attempt to splice male fashion with non-threatening female hues.”
What is needed is more innovation from designers. My favorite blazers are silk and linen fabrics with stretch. But unfortunately most women’s suits are 
made with stiff and heavy material that is very unforgiving. Cape-like (really don’t cringe) blazers like that in the the 1968 Yves Saint Laurent Safari-inspired collection, are remarkably flattering and something I very much wish would take off. And how about this look Scarlett’s rocking with the bunchy blouse and open jacket? Alternatives are out there, but we need an Yves Saint Laurent fashion genius to introduce them to the mainstream.
And fashion trends have a longer life cycle than ever before. Yeah, gauchos and furry boots came and went, but for the most part your wardrobe doesn’t look much different than it did ten years ago. In comparison, it took only five years to go from Mad Men’s “New Look” style to the Summer of Love. Fashion designers are clearly inspired by the show, and many fall collections were attempts to modernize these looks. Michael Kors is so taken with it, he is giving away the first season DVD collection with any purchase. Even if more relaxed, feminine looks are introduced as office attire, it will take a while (and twice that if you live in Boston or DC) to enter the mainstream. But I’m patient and optimistic.
Previously:
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
Related links:
- Juergen Teller quote relevant to all of this
- Hot girls make great clothes, Sociological Images
- Vintage Blues, a great website about fashion history
- What We Wore, Fortune, 1999, a history of menswear
- What Would Joan Do?
- The Slut Machine of 1962, Vidiot Tumble
- Princess Sparkle Pony
- Fashion’s Yves, NYT with picture of 1962 3-piece suit.
- YSL Le Smoking Tuxedo Suit.
- The Retro Women of Mad Men are the Most Interesting on TV, Jezebel
- Behind the Madness | Costume Designer Janie Bryant, NYT The Moment
- Slacking Hillary, Lenore Skenazy
Handmade Looking Writing
Reviewing “Lesser Panda,” by Sarah Morris at White Cube in London, The Guardian’s Adrian Searle recently wrote “Technically, Morris’s paintings are so accomplished there is nowhere for them to go. They are what they are and do what they do, resolutely declaring themselves as both product and spectacle.”
But…
Next to a Sarah Morris painting I feel sweaty, awkward, street-soiled and gangling. There’s not a bleed of paint, an errant hair or a fly trapped anywhere in the paint. If Morris’s horizontals or verticals ever appear off-whack, it is because the world is wrong. Euclid would run screaming from the room.To witness such perfection in a handmade object is wearying. Even Mondrian was allowed blips. Barnett Newman was positively sloppy. Morris’s unremitting dazzle is somehow soulless and inhuman, which I guess is the intention. However much the colour sings and the Olympic quoits jump and shuffle about, the general effect is alienating.
Reading that, I was reminded of an interview with Margaret Kilgallen, where she said she tries her best to make her lines even, but she doesn’t mind some asymmetry or crookedness as it is the sign of a human touch.
Will the Kilgallen way ever be the prevailing attitude toward online writing: the idea that a typo here or there is just the sign of a human being behind the text?
Were an artist to seek “perfection” in every painting, the end result would likely be fewer paintings. Some artists are better at it: a tighter grip, keener eye, or a number of other reasons can enable more precision. While it is true there is some laziness to letting a line get crooked, I don’t know of any art critic holding it against an artist unless it’s obvious.
Published writers aren’t allowed mistakes. To many, any kind of error proves absence of authority. Previously, we discussed the unlikelihood of conversational artificial life any time soon. The English language just has too many words, each nuanced with a number of scarcely interpretable resonances. But someday we’ll be talking to robots and they’ll be writing our press releases. And when they do, will it seem cool to let go a misspelling or a grammatical error here or there? You know…just to keep the reader on his toes.
The amount of email we all struggle with means if you aren’t born with a copyediting sixth sense, you probably made several errors today. The l33t-speak “teh” once seemed to signal “I’m too busy to backspace.” (Don’t we often feel that way? I’ve got something like 50 emails weighing on my shoulders and I’d love it if half the future recipients wouldn’t be offended if I type the message out as fast as I think it.)
Also, we make tradeoffs with our time. Time is allocated depending on the priority of the recipient. A document I turn in to my employer is edited line by line several times. But with emails to friends, I don’t just skip spell check — sometimes I don’t read it over before pressing send (which usually leads to clarifications in the Re:s, but anyway!) My blog is somewhere in the middle. Fretting over the spelling and grammar eats into the short time I have to write the posts. And writing out my ideas is the point of this blog. That being said, it’s the first page result googling my name, and on the off chance someone important is checking it out, I don’t want to appear hasty or incompetent.
That’s what spelling and grammar is all about: appearances. There are people out there who, no matter what you accomplish in life, will view you as at a third grade intellect if your tenses don’t match.
Tech Dirt recently wrote:
There’s a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It’s the infamous “Grammar Nazi.” There are nice Grammar Nazis — and we appreciate those — and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply that you are the stupidest person to ever touch a keyboard because you mixed up affect and effect. From my perspective, I certainly appreciate the folks who point out the grammatical errors we make (we try to fix them quickly, if it makes sense), though I often find it silly to get bogged down in some of the minutiae of certain grammar rules that for all intents and purposes are almost universally ignored.
He also explains a nice Grammar Nazi (”usually emails us privately”) and the obnoxious kind (”always, always, always posts their comments publicly.”) By the way, if a writer does happen to write “you’re” instead of “your”: yes, he probably does know the difference, dearest helpful readers. Those of us without the sixth sense sometimes type homophones when we are working fast.
What is particularly vexing about the correctors is the implication that someone who makes typos doesn’t deserve to write. This is the belief of elementary school English teachers, at least when I was growing up. Points were docked for misplaced commas or misspellings, so the person with the highest grade didn’t necessarily write the greatest essay.
The best editors aren’t the best writers. I like the first draft quality of Philip K. Dick’s books. Maybe Gertrude Stein wasn’t as self-aware as people thought, when it came to her run-on sentences. I hate to think the reason modern literature is such a wasteland these days is because the genius novelist we’ve been waiting for was turned away by a Random House editor, “Ah, he can’t spell.”
Art by Sarah Morris.
Previously:
Saying Yes and Hearing No
Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?
Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”
When Humanity Only Survives Within Driving Distance of a Shopping Mall
The city can become an addiction. Live in it too long, and your body will reject the outdoors. Over the weekend, I got up early-ish to catch La Strada at the Brattle (part of the free Elements Of Cinema series.) It seemed like a good Saturday morning thing: get coffee, watch a smart film, maybe browse the dress shops and get coffee again.
But as soon as I opened my eyes, they started to burn. I left the window open that night and the airborne pollens — ragweed or whatever it is that Zyrtec normally takes care of — drifted into my room and into my eyes like evil pixie dust. I shut my window, got dressed, and did what I normally don’t do trying to get to Harvard Square: I drove.
The whole “pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd” thing is a joke not just on the Boston accent. Driving in Harvard Square is kind of like pushing marbles through straws. Saturday morning isn’t much of a problem. Well, any Saturday other than yesterday.
Due to construction, the two and three hour parking spots within eight blocks were unavailable. The open spots were limited to one hour. Hardly enough time to attend a movie and a lecture. No going around it: the meter maids in this city are busybodies. After circling around several times, wishing I were on my bike, I ended up parking much farther than I intended and came smack in contact with exactly what I’d been avoiding all morning: the outside air.
It was a beautiful day. Low 80s, clear skies, perfect for biking, running, reading under a tree, anything outside. But rather than delighting in the weather, I was cursing it. Lightheaded, my eyes feeling like sandpaper lined the rims, sneezing, I was just a mess. I thought wearing glasses would make it better but it was just the opposite: contact lenses shield against these allergens. The sunshine was bouncing off the lenses, only making the situation worse.
This is urban New England, I’m hardly Lawrence of Arabia in a sandstorm, but it bothered me so much, and realizing I was already twenty minutes late, I returned to my car thinking, “how far to the Cambridgeside Galleria?”
I was looking for refuge from the outside world in the form of a shopping mall. My body was rejecting nature in favor of the sanitized, always-68 degrees shopping center down the street. So I watched the sky from the Whole Foods cafe, waiting until I could blink again without discomfort.
Just as domesticated pets can’t make it in the wilderness, city people, according to the “hygiene hypothesis,” live in such clean conditions their immune systems weaken. Preschool peanut bans are so prevalent and contentious, I wouldn’t be surprised if the DEA gets involved eventually.
In addition to increased sensitivity, cities produce more ragweed due to CO2 levels — increasing with climate change. There are additional ripple effects on tree pollen, fungal spores, and other allergens. And warmer climate means the allergy season is much longer than it ever was before.
Years ago, people with severe allergies found relief in the mountains. But “increased human activity such as building and other disturbances of the soil, irrigation, and gardening, have encouraged ragweed to spread to these areas as well.” We’re building our way unhealthy.
Damien Atkins’s play “Lucy” (Kurt Anderson interview here) is about an anthropologist with a 13 year old autistic daughter. She comes to the conclusion her daughter “is perfect. She’s the future,” making a stunning hypothesis that autism is evolution. Mankind is protecting itself from the devastating environmental consequences of modern living. (A little Kumbaya, but quite a lot smarter than whatever M Night Shyamalan was going on.)
Wall-E so radically tackled devolution with the future human race portrayed as gelatinous blobs. More accurately they would have sneezed uncontrollably at contact with the plant.
Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] was a great comment/parody/prophesy of the modern age fraught with yuppie ailments:
“Safe” has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband and a beautiful house. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grand-mal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she’s become sensitive to the common toxins in today’s world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are “environmentally ill,” and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, “sensitive” individual named Peter Dunning.
I remember watching it in high school, thinking “just get over it!” Likely someone is thinking the same thing reading my opening paragraph. It’s embarrassing, but I’m not alone:
Ragweed pollen and mold thrive in the opposite conditions. So when it’s dry and windy, you get ragweed; when it’s damp and rainy, you get mold.
Here’s the other cheerful news, you might want to prepare for a worse ragweed season next year. Dr. Mark Dykewicz, chief of the Section of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, at St. Louis University School of Medicine says that next year’s ragweed crop will be from this years rainy, fertile conditions.
In Europe, they are putting up “Wild West ‘wanted’ posters” advocating burning the ragwood (”ambrosia”) plants, which climbing north to Germany, and even Scandinavia.
‘Some gardeners naively think it is an attractive plant and give it water and fertilizer in their front gardens,’ says Susanne Schwarz of Berlin’s Health Department.
‘They should be eradicating this menace instead,’ she adds. ‘Best thing to do is pull it out by the roots and burn it, since the seeds can remain fertile for up to 40 years.’
In case you’re wondering, yeah, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this week. In the meantime, a friend advised me to take local honey because the pollen in the honey acclimates you to the pollen in the air. Sounds unlikely, but I appreciate the concept as a narrative. Maybe if The Happening hadn’t resigned itself as a joke, Mark Walberg would have hunted the wilderness for an antidote. A lab set up in the fields somewhere. The twist ending M Night Shymalan forgot to write, like a riff on Dorothy’s discovery: the answer is “no further than our own backyard”
Until then, closing my eyes is as heavenly as a dive in a pool full of feathers. And I’m thinking allergies are nature’s way of reminding us to pay attention.
Photography by Julia Fullerton-Batten.
Previously:
Who Needs Sleep?
An Apology for Idlers
Related links:
- Hygiene Hypothesis on PBS, Evolution: “The Evolutionary Arms Race”
- Architects take Beijing’s smog into account, LA Times (via.)
- Ragweed Allergy Heats Up With Climate Change, Medical News Today
- Take Me Out To The (Peanut-Free) Ballgame, Channel3000
Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
“Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show.” - George Saunders (via.)
The other night, I attended “No More Bush Tour” at PA’s Lounge, a bunch of bands celebrating the last days of the shrub, including Bobb Trimble, whose obscure early-80s psychedelic records were rereleased on Secretly Canadian last year, the hypnotic Fahey-like guitar sounds of Jack Rose and several others. Between the acts there were literary readings, most memorably Damon Krukowski, (of Damon and Naomi, the best two-thirds of Galaxie 500.)
Krukowski and Yang run Exact Change, publishing experimental classics like Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, and Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring. It’s an impressive catalogue of books (beautifully designed by Yang.)
They focus on Surrealism, Dada, and Pataphysics, and all of the books are at least 50 years old. Nevertheless, Yang and Krukowski receive a fair share of requests to publish new work over the years. Many of the queries are strange. Very strange. One writer says he will “expose Marquis de Sade as the rank amateur he is” with his forthcoming novel including such horrors as “AIDS in preschools,” and other gruesome situations. Another was an extremely bizarre and lengthly erotic work — with numbered paragraphs — about a “brand new spiritual organ.”
I was reminded of the room in the Museum of Jurassic Technology with letters to Mount Wilson Observatory from amateur astronomers. (”Hydrogen, was created by Electricity between Nitrogen and Oxygen and the three forms the Trinity of Life Even as Electricity, Nitrogen and Etholeum form the trinity of all planetary existance. Electricity the (passtime p) thru Nitrogen the passtime Entrance ( ) Hydrogen between Nitrogen and Oxygen and these ( ) forms the air and the water with the surface of the earth.and that of the water between which is the trinity of the worlds existance. By the gathering of the water below and above to form the firmament which in the beginning God called Heaven, and wherein we live.”) And of the colorful stories of friends of mine who looked over the slush piles at their respective publications
Once I was a judge for a film script competition and it was a frustrating experience because, while everything I read was silly, I felt morally obligated to read closely in case I should glaze over the one line that might reveal a seemingly horrible script as a Hal Hartley-style farce.
A letter to Krukowski pronounces “we’re all insane unless something’s going wrong.” A crazy person zen koan that is kind of endearing, and an example of how the Diane Arbus question never went away.
One might look at the variations of “outsider art” and the mixed emotions of exploitation, sympathy, and curiosity of its spectators. And outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Roky Erickson, and the documentaries about them that never quite articulated whether their (in Erickson’s case, new-found) success was based on talent or novelty.
Very often, I turn to Paul West’s “Mem, Mem, Mem,” published in The American Scholar (and Harper’s) last autumn, as an example of sifting a golden kernel out of what might otherwise seem like nonsense. In it, West, once a first rate literature scholar, describes his condition of both Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia the only way he can now: in aphasiac language.
You disentangle the least bit of wiry fluff that has been haunting your tongue for half an hour, and assign it to the unwilling project of the human mess. These rank as contributions in some way or other, but the assorted confectioneries are too massive to eat, and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow, which makes them both second-rate substitutes and sees them out. What I’m trying to say, in language ever more oblique, is that the human psyche can sometimes see evidence of what is not present to the senses.
The book, The Shadow Factory, was released last April.
The other question this raises is whether we accept “crazy” experimental things from people so long as they appear upstanding. A recent Washington Post article on Jeff Koons says the most surprising thing about Koons is how polite and sane he appears. I find that least surprising. As Mikita Brottman said, “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” Naturally, the normal articulate ones are those most likely to receive grants and succeed in other ways.
Then there’s JG Ballard, whose novel Crash famously received the verdict “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” from a publisher. That it was ever published must have something to do with Ballard’s record of several conventional(-ish) novels prior and that’s he’s Cambridge educated, undeniably intelligent, and presentable.
Were JG Ballard completely inarticulate about his ideas, and were that his only work, would Crash have the same power? Do we look at the man behind the curtain because we are too timid to align our sympathies with the work of a person who might genuinely be mad?
When it comes to experimental literature (or film, art, etc,) I find myself less capable of explaining what it is I like or dislike about it. And I am reluctant to suggest many of these titles to others simply because I can’t determine whether it’s the work that’s so moving or the result of projecting my own values and ideas on vague atmospheric paragraphs.
This is all a very long way to go about mentioning Mattathias Schwartz’s riveting New York Times magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us.
There’s not much I can build on what was already written (so very well!) by Schwartz, and commented on just about everywhere else. But it’s applicable here, because you find the strangest comments on the most MSM websites: CNN, New York Times. Conviction that their words are worthy of being printed in the grey lady. Finally the crazies have a platform. And so long as it’s left unmoderated, if there is a Cassandra among them, we might find her.
Automatic drawings by Unica Zurn
Previously:
Why Read at All?
Unica Zurn and Rachel Feinstein Currin: Fantasies Embodied
Related links:
- Damon and Naomi
- Damon Krukowski interviewed in The Modern World
- Naomi Yang interviewed in Dust Bureau
- Unica Zurn on Myspace
- “Under-Appreciated Existing Legal Remedies for Trolling, Defamation and Other “Malwebolent” Invasions of Privacy,” TLF
- The Chimeras of Unica Zurn, artnet
- Who cares about Ann Quin? Lee Rourke
Five Books I Recommend to Everyone
I hate the idea of a canon of good books one must read “before you die,” or that sort of thing. Many of these are books aren’t beloved so much as revered. Has anyone ever felt passionately about “A Separate Peace?” If you do, it’s probably because you had a dog when you were nine named Phineas or some other subconscious sentimental reason. But besides the titles that only developed a reputation for substance, even the ones that are of merit and historical importance aren’t necessary to you, at least, not right now.
So many people make the mistake of plodding along with every sewer sub-plot in Les Miserables because they think doing so makes them smarter. One should be confident enough to call the “emperor has no clothes” on books that bore or fail to say anything illuminating. Many 19th century novels like Thomas Hardy’s were sold by word count. So don’t few guilty if you’re skimming through yet another description of the color of the fields for a scene with Eustacia Vye doing something crazy.
While it’s good to read popular and much loved books for a shared experience with the culture, how much like the rest of the world are you? Shouldn’t your reading reflect your personal fears and dreams and expectations? It’s sad to see how little readers demand of their writers. The experience I get with Anna Kavan’s or Steve Erickson’s novels seems to go way beyond anything I’ve ever felt about a book. I can’t say for certain that another reader might have the same feeling, but I hope you all come to love an author that much. Trial and error, really. Would you marry the girl you just kinda like, but find annoying sometimes, but guess is cute cause others say she’s cute? Then toss aside the book you’re not so into, and keep hunting for the right ones.
Here are several books I imagine anyone might like:
If you like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, try Christopher Priest’s Inverted World
Every once in a while the elder statesmen book reviewers let a cult writer in the canon of great literature like Beckett or, to a lesser degree, Burroughs. O’Brien seems to be the newest corronated one. The Third Policeman is great, but after a million retrospective pieces in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and so forth, and a mention on the tv series Lost you might want to try another book about riddles and shifting dimensions. This is a traditional science fiction book, but ingenious — very reminiscent of Ballard’s early earth-disaster SF. And it’s a mindfuck. An Escher sketch in novel form. I couldn’t put it down. Proof that Modern Painters is better cued in to good literature than most literary publications, they have a review of this book in the newest issue.
If you like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, try Anna Kavan’s Eagle’s Nest
As much as I like Burroughs, Naked Lunch is so full of 50s junkie slang it can be difficult to read. Anna Kavan, his contemporary, has a liquidy way of writing. Scenes are so full of life they seem to fall off the page. A heroin addict until she died in her sixties, with a truly heartbreaking lifestory, you can feel, with some bitterness, where the drug is influencing her writing as you read along. Adored by the likes of Anais Nin, Jean Rhys, Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Current 93’s David Tibet, and many others, why she isn’t better known here or abroad really baffles me.
If you like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, try I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
I can’t imagine anyone disliking I’m Not Stiller. It’s witty and so smart. Imagine the best parts of Confederacy of Dunces and the best of Nabokov, with a little bit of Chandler suspense and Kafka humor, all written so well the Dalkey Archive would publish it.
If you like Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, try by The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
Winterson’s novel is a good book about gender and androgyny and all that, with pretty poetic language, but you can get all of those things plus a post-apocalyptic setting and a bunch of fun in The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s best and inexplicably most obscure novel. Were I handed a few million dollars, turning The Passion of New Eve into a musical would be on a short list of things I’d do with the money.
If you like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, try Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai
Ok, I don’t like Safran Foer’s book at all, but a lot of people whose opinions I respect seemed to enjoy it. A better book about a young braniac, chock full of random information and done in a sweet, never cloying way, is The last Samurai. Of the 80 people reviewed it on Amazon, 56 gave it 5 stars, which should give you an idea how much people love this book.
Fashion photography by Alix Malka
In Favor of the Sensitive Superheroes
They had learned to expose the purely macho type, his false masculinity, physical force, dexterity in games, arrogance, but more dangerous still, his lack of sensitivity. The hero of Last Tango in Paris repulsed them. The sadist, the man who humiliates women, whose show of power is a facade. THe so-called heroes, the stance of a Hemingway or a Mailer in writing, the false strength. All this was exposed, disposed of by these new women, too intelligent to be deceived, too wise and too proud to be subjected to this display of power which did not protect them (as previous generations of women believed) but endagered their existence as individuals.
Their attraction shifted to the poet, the musician, the singer, the sensitive man they had studied with, to the natural sincere man without stance or display, nonassertive, the one concerned with true values, not ambition, the one who hates war and greed, commercialism and political expediencies. A new type of man to match the new type of woman. They helped each other through college, they answered each other’s poems, they wrote confessional and self-examining letters, they prized their relationship, they gave care to it, time, attention. They did not like impersonal sensuality. Both wanted to work at something they loved.
- Anais Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man.
One thing I find fascinating about the new Batman cast is Aaron Eckhart, Cillian Murphy, Christian Bale (well, up until last week) and the late Heath Ledger — each of them is someone a Vassar coed might be thrilled to share a pot of rooibus tea after Comparative Lit 201, watching “Fox and His Friends” on the futon. Just like Shia Leboeuf, Toby Maguire as Spiderman, Edward Norton, the Incredible Hulk and to a lesser extent, Will Smith in all his roles and Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man. And don’t forget how V in V for Vendetta didn’t just cook breakfast, he listened to Cat Power and Antony and the Johnsons too.
Today’s superhero is exactly what Anais Nin was pining for in In Favor of the Sensitive Man. (”Do not, I say to today’s women, please do not mistake sensitivity for weakness. This was the mistake which almost doomed our culture. Violence was mistaken for power, the misuse of power for strength.”)
Maybe the first sensitive superheros were Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo. But then Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, and the governor of California came along. Might this be the real reason behind Indiana Jones’ twenty-five year absence? And now how things have changed: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Cobra Commander in the upcoming GI Joe film!
Will this trend continue and will it grow more pronounced? Might alpha male frat guy stereotypes come to represent the ultimate evil, a foil to the bookish, respectful, feminist guys who beat them to a bloody pulp?
Are Vin Diesel project scripts now going to Lukas Haas? What about Alan Cumming as the first bisexual James Bond? I laugh, but of course the Seth Cohen-ization of superheroes is good for humanity, and blah, blah, blah…
Art by Yinka Shonibare
Previously:
Film Review: “Confessions of a Superhero”
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
A narcissist enjoys punishment as much as praise. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, but criticism is preferable to no attention at all. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a classic example of our country’s narcissistic impulse. Attention was never on the Iraqi prisoner-victims. Instead we focused on how bad this made us look. How bad we were to let those bad people move up to high ranks.
The iconic photos were all about America — about us. And after several years, there is no singular image of an Iraq victim — out of the context of American imprisonment — that captured our attention the same way.
The Abu Ghraib images created a remote sense of guilt — anger more than sympathy. If the attention is on our own terribleness that means we can change (or pretend to change.) In the end, justice was carried out on those bad apple soldiers (or seemed that way.)
Compare that to the unblinking attention the famous image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc requires of a viewer. The photograph told the world the only way they could correct this wrongdoing and put an end to her suffering, was ending the Vietnam war entirely.
There are many photographs of the Iraq war as powerful as that picture of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but none has marked the public consciousness the same way. I bet most people couldn’t recall a single image of a victim other than the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think that has to do with how we are adjusting to new ways of reading news.
The shift toward Internet as a primary news source didn’t cause the Iraq war, but certainly made it more convenient. You don’t have to eat your peas before desert, you don’t have to sit through fifteen minutes of world news to find out what celebrity got married today.
Maybe it is knowing that we can always access information about Iraq that keeps us from doing so in the present. If it were that ABC News only showed Iraq footage at 6 pm every night, maybe we’d be more likely to tune in because then the footage would feel like an event — something we had to know, that we could only glean within a certain time frame. Without an event framing it, the sense “I should watch this now” is lost to the understanding, “I can watch this later.”
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.
The challenge is designing a news website that encourage immediate and full attention. The Washington Post’s web chats with authors and public figures is a good example of this. The opportunity to communicate directly with a person of prominence cannot be done later, nor can one participate in a chat with only half his attention. I would also point to the book readings and events staged in Second Life, if Second Life didn’t seem so pet rock to me. A smart website would start using video conferencing software to have its writers interact with readers. The trick is not to archive the footage immediately. Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
I really think a return to live chat is where web 3.0 (or whatever it is called) is going. Maybe we’ll also see a move toward call-in online video. Live email, instant messaging, and live Skype chats with the hosts.
Images by Yang Shaobin.
Update 7/23/08: Ekstasis made this great point:
This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”
It’s true, the most exciting media right now is game-related. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times or others tries to implement games with their media (as I’m sure they will.) Wouldn’t it be great to get a free subscription to the Sunday paper if you get the highest score on a news quiz? Things like that will make such a difference.
Looking over this post again, which I didn’t really expect anyone to pay attention to (ha!) it seems like two different points and discontinuous. But the point of my intro on Abu Ghraib is that the one detail about the Iraq war people really know about and fixate on is more about us than about the Iraqis. It’s kind of like, if the only thing people knew about Vietnam were My Lai.
Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping
People turn to the past because they are looking for something that they don’t find in the present — comfort and well-being… Only the wealthy or the very poor can live in the past; only the former do so by choice.
- Witold Rybczynski, Home
Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property — it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in. I lived there briefly myself when I was going to college nearby. Recently, she was to close on a deal with a young married couple, but then she looked up the wife on the internet and discovered the woman is well known as an area “house flipper.”
This neighborhood eschews miles and miles of Washington, DC suburban sprawl with its vestiges of pedestrian life: it is a 10 minute walk to the West Falls Church metro, and 5 minutes to a main street with a coffee shop, dry cleaner, TJ Maxx, a good balance of chains and small businesses. A bike trail is nearby.
Because of its conveniences and location, the land is pricey. Buyers willing to pay for West Falls Church real estate generally want several bedrooms and five baths. Over the years, my aunt has complained about the trasformation of modest homes — 70s-style “post-and-beam extravaganzas” as this article in Residential Architect puts it — into regurgitated palatial fantasies. Soon hers will be the only non McMansion on the block.
And gross remodeling may be its inevitable second life. For now, she’s still waiting for someone who will respect the design of the place. This isn’t some kind of a penance — the house is really beautiful. There are few places I’ve felt quite as cozy in, as I have reading a book on the back porch looking out at the garden. The use of the space, the way the windows are shaped, so much of my idea of a perfect house comes from living there that year in 2003.
A few years ago, I was guiltily obsessed with A&E and TLC house flipping programs and marveled at how often the flipper blatantly conned people out of their property. The worst of them was Armando Montelongo, a San Antonio flipper who is half as likeable as Roger Clemens, just a little less weird than that plastic surgeon on Dr 90210, an internet scam artist, and known for habitually neglecting to pay his contractors.
“Mondo” does a lot of objectionable things on the show, from piggish to illegal. He once had his wife and sister-in-law dress in beekeeper costumes to exterminate a colony of bees, so he could save $300 on a professional beekeeper. He watched them from a lawnchair, beer in hand. Then there’s something about him hiring children of illegal aliens for a demolition project. Now he’s dealing with several lawsuits — facing jailtime — not paying one contractor, owing backtaxes, and the 20 or so properties of his that went into foreclosure. The guy is a crook and A&E should have known better.
But I most despised him when he’d make false promises to whomever he’s buying the house from: that he’d never strip the Victorian wallpaper. That he likes the bar in the kitchen their father made. That he’ll keep the structure the same way, but just clean it up a little bit. A widow or widower passes, and the descendants can’t afford to keep up the house. All they want is to know someone is enjoying the home as grandpa made it. Money isn’t a main issue at a time like that. So he pretend to agrees, taking the bargain, and soon after breaks his word — neglecting the family’s wishes on TV! It’s not just knucklehead-ed behavior, it’s usually aesthetically disappointing: ironing out everything that made the home unique in order to appeal to the most buyers. A hardwood floor and granite countertop sacrificial rape of a property.
Now, my politics are more freemarket than most: I don’t believe in rent control for the reason of economic scarcity, but sale of a home has so much more at stake than most financial transactions. A price that is agreed to with the understanding the buyer will preserve without excessively altering the property, can be a binding agreement. But does this ever happen? I’m right now trying to find examples of this in real estate cases. I guess this is more of a post I’m writing as I’m thinking about it, rather than a clear statement of any kind. And any books readers might recommend on the subject are much appreciated.
Like with the Neutra Kaufmann House house that just sold in Christie’s auction. Is it only a tacit understanding that the buyer isn’t going to tear down a wing to build a gnome garden?
Here’s an example of preservation gone to an unpleasant extreme:
Richard Lucas has been trying to win permission to cut through his elderly, infirm parents’ front porch so they can get from their living quarters onto the street without climbing stairs. And for more than a year, the D.C. historic preservation authorities have found reasons to say no to a ramp.
After all, as the city’s architectural historian put it, “repeating porches of similar height and depth create a notable pattern and rhythm” along the Lucas family’s Mount Pleasant street, and the District wouldn’t want to let that rhythm be broken just to accommodate a couple of old folks who have lived in their house for 47 years.
Houses in communities respond to the changes in houses all around them, which is why I fear my aunt’s beautiful house will eventually go all Stepford. Even if they did find buyers to fall in love with it, there is the risk that given time they might give in to the status-conscious vibe of the neighborhood and build additions.
One of the best articles, one of the most linked-to essays this year, The Next Slum? by Christopher B Leinberger for The Atlantic, so immediately struck at the hearts of most of us, the unfortunate truth that the wealthy really are taking over our cities. Sure crime is down, but you try to live in Brooklyn on an artist’s salary.
One vacant home, means the depreciation of an entire neighborhood. And down like dominos the foreclosure crisis, which may likely “stay with us well into the next decade,” as Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com says in Bloomberg, puts pressure on all the neighboring homes until they too eventually tip.
It’s easier to erect a new house than it is to change an entire landscape. Recently, I learned there’s a “ghost cloverleaf” in Canton, MA, just several miles from me. Eventually I’ll check it out and post about it, until then, here’s this write up on Xconomy:
[It] was constructed between 1962 and 1968, and is the northern half of what was originally intended to be a fully working interchange between I-95, aka the Southwest Expressway, and I-93, aka Route 128, aka the Yankee Division Highway.
From here, the state’s highway blueprints called for the Southwest Expressway to continue about 10 miles north into Boston. It would have barreled through farmland and residential neighborhoods in Milton and joined up with the American Legion Highway, which would have been converted into an expressway running along the eastern edge of Franklin Park. From there, the expressway would have turned Blue Hill Avenue into a six-lane gash through Roxbury and Dorchester, eventually connecting with I-695 near the present-day intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street (which happens to be about four blocks from where I live in the South End).
Never heard of I-695? That’s because it was never built, either. Also called the Inner Belt, it was part of a scheme laid out in 1948 to help interstate drivers and truckers avoid the congestion in downtown Boston by circling through outer Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville. Perhaps it was a good idea at one time. But had this 7-mile loop been constructed, the Boston cityscape would be immeasurably different today.
“We do not pine for period cuisine,” Rybczynski wrote, paraphrasing Adolf Loos’ point that nostalgia is absent in most other aspects of our everyday lives. And most houses, just out of practicality due to changes in energy usage, really should be remodeled. But there are reasons we might value those floors that no matter how many times you sweep, will never seem clean. Reviewing Flipping Out, the only remaining house flipping TV show on the air today, Heather Havrilesky cleverly compares two of her neighborhood cafes. One where “tables are the wrong height for the chairs, the chairs are uncomfortable, the walls are covered in bad art, the bad stereo system blares the worst of Journey and Lionel Richie, the breakfast sandwich features over-buttered bread and that fake-smoke-flavor ham, the room is too hot or freezing cold, the teenage cashiers are friendly but inattentive, and a herd of middle-of-the-room flies circles endlessly in the sparsely populated dining area,” another a, “more corporate place nearby where everything is right. The tables and chairs are made of smooth wood and are perfectly placed, the menu is tastefully designed, the lighting makes everyone look like models at a photo shoot, classical music soothes patrons from a safe distance, cool breezes blow in the open French doors, and the small cup of gazpacho they serve has little slices of melon and a dab of pesto in it. Delightful! But it’s always crowded with people who have expensive haircuts and alarmingly nice shoes.”
As repellent and deeply wrong as the local cafe is, the overpriced, meticulously designed corporate eatery seems certain to transform you, slowly but surely, into the kind of person who pays too much for haircuts and shoes, the kind of person who experiences gazpacho that doesn’t have a little dab of pesto in it the way the rest of us experience a herd of middle-of-the-room flies. And therein lies the paradox of American upward mobility: The higher you climb, the thinner the air gets, until you can barely breathe.
Nostalgic or not, my aunt’s house as a standing protest against the McMansion-ization of suburban DC, and a call for the better days. If anyone is looking for such a property, please get in touch.
Images by William Eggleston.
Previously:
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post Facebook
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities
Related links:
- Home by Witold Rybczynski
- Do Hard-to-get Mortgages mean Better Cities? Treehugger
- The Broken Angel on Wikipedia
- Flip This Lawsuit
- Flipping Houses Ethics: Any Place for a Weasel?
- They Needed to Talk Some More, Smithsonian Magazine explaining William Eggleston’s most famous image
- The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park, Adrian Short
The Dystopic Hippie Election Movie That Might Have Stopped the Twenty-sixth Amendment
Right now, Germany is considering eliminating its voting age requirement. This is a great idea. The American Scene had a post a few months ago explaining why crazy as it sounds at first, kids are no less irrational in their preferences than adults:
I think another age barrier would be just as senseless as the one we have now. Kids should be able to get the vote when they decide they want the vote. A child who is old enough to vote (and who is a better judge of that than himself?) should be able to walk into his friendly neighborhood voting registration office and register for himself.
Does this mean the FLDS could become a viable voting block? Well, maybe. But:
each electoral system is skewed a certain way. Britain’s first past the post system under-represents many groups, and of course much has been said about the American Electoral College (note that I support both first past the post and the Electoral College); proportional party list voting, supposed to be most representative, gives disproportionate influence to small, niche parties (Israel, anyone?). Today’s system essentially amounts to a vote subsidy (which then turns into a cash subsidy) to the old. Giving kids the vote would correct skewed voting, not introduce it.With all these practicalities also taken into account, the final (and best) argument I can think of for giving kids the vote is simply one person one vote. It’s as simple as that. In a democracy, each person should have a vote. Children are persons. They should get the vote. The principle is straightforward enough, and I see no way to escape it.
You can read a lot of the comments here and here, but generally the only reason I think this could be a bad idea in practice is an obscure hippie dystopia-comedy called Wild in the Streets.
It’s based on a short story by Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) called “The Day it All Happened, Baby.” I can’t find the text online, but the title should give you some idea how it plays.
Rock star Max Frost wages a youth revolt after discovering “52% of America is under 25! They’re the minority! We’re the majority!” The kids rally together, first by electing the oldest of their friends to Congress. These 25 years old representatives make up a majority, and vote to lower the age limits. As Frost’s pothead girlfriend in a Paul Revere hat says, “Ask….for the constitution….to be…amended…to … uhh….” She bangs the drum. “We suggest the required age for a representative….be 14….for senete ….be 14….for president, 14.”
And they do it. Soon enough, Max Frost is elected United States president. “You’re part of that alcoholic generation, Dad,” a smirking kid says to his father, “But dig, I got the vote now, man.”
If you watch any of these YouTube clips, make it this one, with the campaign song, “14 or Fight”
It’s much stranger than The Trip or I Love You Alice B Toklas, or anything else I’ve seen from this era. Because rather than just playing out the absurdity of a twenty-something rock star president, things go all Lord of the Flies, and President Frost decides to send those old squares to internment camps where they are forced to take LSD. Cause they deserve it, those “sneaky panther olds!”
Everyone over the age of 30 is sent away, unless they pass as under 30 cause that means they’re cool, dig? “They’re heavy with honey and they can’t fly. You better believe me. they can’t fly!” President Frost explains to anyone who might think the internment camps are a touch insensitive.
Not to say he’s any less articulate than the sitting president, but the script clearly never saw a second draft. It’s chock full of gems like, “What about the chicks? nobody gave them the vote. they fought for it…we got the old tigers scared baby, because right now we outnumber the fuzz and we outnumber the shopkeepers…we can take them out, baby.”
It’s consistently bleak. Leading up to the grand idea of LSD camps, the “heads” joke about assasinating people in congress. And Shelley Winters has this disturbing LCD meltdown:
As you can see, she’s wearing a Peace sign patch on her sleeve. Hmm. Enforcing the LSD camps are black clad soldiers. The Holocaust insinuation becomes clearer when you watch some “olds” crying as they hide in a basement. Or maybe it’s an overblown comparison to slavery — they talk about finding an old person “underground railroad” to Mexico or Canada.
But hey, it’s cool. President Frost says, chill, he’s just trying to “create the most purely hedonistic society the world has ever known.”
Ummm….What exactly is this film trying to say?
Having watched it in its entirety, I am totally convinced this was all an elaborately staged pro-Nixon operation. And it’s a good thing it never found a wider audience, because it might have prevented the twenty-sixth amendment from passing three years later. “Hey man, we fight for our country at 18, we should vote at 18,” is a lot less convincing an argument coming from a tie-dye t-shirt-wearing dude with a pipe in his hand.
Wild in the Streets is the most coherent argument for political “experience” ever made. I’m now paranoid the GOP might find a way to start playing it on TBS Sunday afternoons as a super subversive Swiftboat attack. The Freepers, unsurprisingly, are at it, suggesting Barack Obama borrow the line “Who in America can resist the clarion call of youth? Never has it been so brazenly sounded. Experience? It has brought you nothing. Max Frost has told you that. Down with experience!” for his next speech.
Previously:
The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”
Oliver Stone’s Prescient SFnal Scientology Critique
Related links:
- Youth cults in film and fiction
- Dan Graham’s Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty
- Germany Considers Voting Rights For Kids, NPR
- “Voting age” in Wikipedia
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