Further to yesterday`s post on Matt Taibbi`s article about the Tea Party in Rolling Stone
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”
This is a well-known and often cited quote from John Stuart Mill in a letter to the Conservative MP, John Pakington, March 1866. The issue Mill was addressing? The unwillingness of the Conservatives to extend women the vote.
Adam Gopnik on the meaning of the quote:
After [his wife] Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGoY9gom50&feature=related
Howl (part 1)
On this date in 1955 Allen Ginsburg read his poem Howl in public for the first time in San Francisco.
Frye in “The Renaissance of Books”:
The great poets of the first half of this century — Eliot, Yeats, Pound — had the somewhat aloof authority conferred by their erudition, even though they often felt the pull of the desire to be genuinely popular. We have the Eliot of Sanskrit quotations and the Eliot of practical cats; we have the Yeats of Rosicrucian symbolism and the Yeats of the luminously simple ballads of the Last Poems. Allen Ginsburg’s Howl is usually taken as the turning point towards a neo-Romantic poetry which has been popular in a way hardly known to previous generations. Much of this poetry has turned back to the primitive oral tradition of folk song, with the formulaic units, topical allusions, musical accompaniment, and public presentation that go with the tradition. (CW 11, 145-6)
In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi takes an in-depth look at the Tea Party. He provides a history of the movement and gives an account of its corporate sponsorship, as well as — most crucially — its absorption by the Republican party. It’s a grim story, but delivered with Taibbi’s characteristic knuckle-sandwich style. The bad news is that the demagoguery that drives the Tea Party movement has given the Republicans a big boost for the midterms. The good news is that the movement is also doomed: too many of its members are old and white and don’t live anywhere near a world of verifiable fact. They are paranoid, resentment-driven and about as intellectually dishonest as it is possible to be, if the term “intellectually” can even be applied here. And, although they haven’t yet figured it out, they’ve already been betrayed by their corporate puppet-masters. The article, “Tea and Crackers,” can be read in its entirety here. A sample:
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul “Tea Parties,” but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey “unconstitutional” orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. (“Not me — I was protesting!” is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Dick Armey, who explains that the problem with “people who do not cherish America the way we do” is that “they did not read the Federalist Papers.”) Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill “cracker babies,” support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called “White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo,” checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.
Eric Murphy Selinger of DePaul University is organizing a panel at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting to take place in Vancouver in the spring. The panel deals with romance in its widest sense. To his credit, I have never heard a lecture by Selinger in which he doesn’t cite Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture or Anatomy of Criticism. So, if you are working on romance, please consider submitting an abstract. Instructions for submitting an abstract are available at http://www.acla.org/acla2011/
Foreign Affairs: Romance at the Boundaries
• Seminar Organizer: Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul U
The 2011 ACLA conference theme invokes “the freshness, excitement, and, yes, fear of experiencing the ‘foreign.’” In the experience of love, that mix of emotions is also on display, not least when the “foreign” other turns out to be ourselves, “shattered” (in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms) by the impact of desire. This seminar will explore how literary and popular texts represent the transformative encounter of self and other, mind and body, old self and new, in romantic love.
How do texts enact encounter aesthetically, through contrapuntal discourses, genres, allusions, or traditions? From Ottoman lyric to Harlequin novel, the literature of love is often highly conventionalized. How have such texts incorporated the freshness of the “foreign,” renewed within—or slipping past—the boundaries of genre?
What are the politics of xenophilia, within or outside of texts? What ethics (and erotics) shape our acknowledgement, violation, or fetishizing of alterity? How does power shift when texts and tropes of love move from language to language, medium to medium, period to period, audience to audience?
Is scholarship also a “foreign affair”? What pleasures and shames shape academic encounters with popular romance, the abjected Other of “literature”? What happens when men study (and write) texts commonly construed to be “by women, for women,” or when women study (and write) male romance? As queer readers study heteronormative texts, and straight readers, queer ones—when East meets West, and South, North—might love of the “foreign” be read as a critical practice, or criticism, a practice of love?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwdUa6fV62s&feature=related
“They Flee from Me”
On this date Sir Thomas Wyatt died (1503-1549).
Frye in Rencontre: “The General Editor’s Introduction”:
It used to be said of Wyatt, being older and further down on the evolutionary scale, was a cruder pioneer than Surrey, who the same kind of thing much better. This view of them resulted from a historical accident. They both belonged to the courtly class of amateur poets who did not publish their poetry, and were first introduced in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), on the eve of Elizabeth’s reign. By that time the new conservatism was in full swing, and the editor of Tottel made many alterations in Wyatt’s work to bring it inl line with Surrey’s, under the impression, so common among editors, that he was improving it. Fortunately Wyatt’s manuscripts have survived, and we can see from them that he is a poet of older radicalism of Skelton and Dunbar as well as the of the new age, and one of the finest experimental poets of any age:
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand: and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.[They Flee from Me, ll. 1-7] (CW 10, 17-18)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXRE_7HzLEQ&p=F099808DD2571B77&playnext=1&index=15
An NFB documentary about the October Crisis
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the October Crisis, which began with the kidnapping of British Trade Commisioner James Cross by the FLQ, or the Front de Liberation du Quebec.
Frye in the Preface to The Bush Garden:
Quebec in particular has gone through an exhilerating and, for the most part, emancipating social revolution. Separatism is the reactionary side of this revolution: what it really aims at is a return to the introverted malaise in which it began, when Quebec’s motto was je me souviens and its symbols were those of the habitant rooted to his land with his mother church over his head, and all the rest of the blood-and-soil bit. One cannot go back to the past historically, but the squalid neo-Fascism of the FLQ terrorists indicates that one can always do so psychologically. (CW 12, 415)
On this date in 1537 the first complete English-language Bible based upon Greek and Hebrew sources, the Matthew Bible, was published, with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
Frye in Symbolism in the Bible:
Already in the Middle Ages, the question had arisen of translating the Bible into the vernacular (or modern) languages. It was resisted by authorities of the Church establishment, partly because the issue very soon got involved with reform movements within the Church. One of these reform movements was led in England by John Wyclif, a contemporary of Chaucer in the fourteenth century. His disciples, working mainly after his death, produced an English translation of the entire Bible, which was of course a translation of the Vulgate Latin text, not of the Greek and Hebrew. Nevertheless, the Wycliffe Bible became the basis for all future English translations. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation broke out in Germany under Luther, and one of Luther’s major efforts to consolidate his position was to make a complete German translation of the Bible, which became among other things the cornerstone of modern German literature.
Similar efforts were made in England. Henry VIII, you remember, declared himself to be head of the Church, but didn’t want to make any alteration to Church doctrine, so he amused himself in his later years by executing Protestants for heresy and Catholics for denying his claim to be head of the Church. Thus, William Tyndale, the first person to work on the translation of the Bible into English from Greek and Hebrew sources, was a refugee and had to work on the Continent. Eventually he was caught by Henry’s goon squad and transported back to England where he was burned at the stake along with copies of his Bible. Henry VIII, with that versatility of intention which is often found in people who have tertiary syphilis, had begun his reign by being called “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope, because he had written a pamphlet attacking Martin Luther–that is to say, his minister Sir Thomas More had written it but Henry had signed it. However, as “Defender of the Faith,” he changed his mind about what faith he was going to defend, and in the last years of his reign the English Bible in the hands of various other translators, including Miles Coverdale, had become established as the official Bible for the Church of England for which he was now the head. (CW 13, 420)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaXDzOl6Iog
