From today’s New York Times:
Last summer, Ms. Giffords’s Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, had a campaign event in which voters were invited to “shoot a fully automatic M-16” with him to symbolize his assault on her campaign.
Here, once again, is the newspaper notice for this “campaign event.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tTDiZZYCAs
Gabrielle Griffords warns Sarah Palin about the “consequences” of putting people in “gun sights”
Clearly, the one thing that would put an end to all hope for genuine social advance in our society would be the growth of conservative violence: the effort, with the aid of a hysterical police force, to trample down all protest into that state of uneasy quiescence under terror which is what George Wallace means by law and order. As the recent Chicago fracas showed, there can be no real doubt that such counter-violence would be much more directed at radicals, even of the most peaceful kind, than at criminals. (“The Ethics of Change,” CW 7, 349)
All the social nightmares of our day seem to focus on some unending and inescapable form of mob rule. The most permanent kind of mob rule is not anarchy, nor is it the dictatorship that regularizes anarchy, nor even the imposed police state depicted by Orwell. It is rather the self–policing state, the society incapable of formulating an articulate criticism of itself and of developing a will to act in its light. This is a condition that we are closer to, on this continent, than we are to dictatorship. In such a society the conception of progress would reappear as a donkey’s carrot, as the new freedom we shall have as soon as some regrettable temporary necessity is out of the way. No one would notice that the necessities never come to an end, because the communications media would have destroyed the memory. (The Modern Century, CW 11, 24)
Once a society renounces violence as a means of resolving its differences, controversy and discussion provide the only means of social advance. Where we have two separating camps of commitment, advance through discussion is paralysed, because all arguments become personal. The argument is seen only as a rationalization of one side, and its proponent is merely identified as a radical or a reactionary, a Communist or an Uncle Tom. (I do not see much force in this last epithet, by the way: Uncle Tom, who was flogged to death for sticking by his principles, seems to me quite an impressive example of non-violent resistance.) The continuing of the paralysis of discussion, in breaking up meetings, shouting down unpopular speakers, and the like, congeals into a mood of anticipatory violence. (“The Ethics of Change,” CW 7, 351)
In all societies there is a built-in tendency to anti-intellectualism. Sometimes this is maintained by a state-enforced dogma, as it is in the vulgar Marxism of the Soviet Union or the still more vulgar version of the Moslem religion enforced in Iran. Sometimes, as in North America, it is simply part of the human resistance to maturity, and to the responsibilities that maturity brings, the instinct to stay safe and protected by the crowd, to shrink from anything that would expand and realize one’s potential. It is this element in society that makes all education, wherever carried on, what I just called a militant enterprise, a constant warfare. The really dangerous battlefront is not the one against ignorance, because ignorance is to some degree curable. It is the battlefront against prejudice and malice, the attitude of people who cannot stand the thought of a fully realized humanity, of human life without the hysteria and panic that controls every moment of their own lives. Words like “elitism” become for such people bogey words used to describe those who try to take their education seriously. At the heart of such social nihilism, this drive to mob rule and lynch law that every society has in some measure, is the resistance to authority. (“Language as the Home of Human Life,” CW 7, 588)
As long as man’s fear of life is deeper than his fear of death, there will always be a tendency for society to degenerate into a mob, moved only by prejudice and hysteria and hatred of the individual. According to Christianity God himself was a victim of such a mob. We are not in a cosy white and black melodrama: we ourselves are involved in crime and corruption. There are millions of people who admire what we have, and fully intend to get it, but don’t particularly admire what we are. Their pressures and others may increase the fears of our own society, and people are not at their best when frightened. What one “does” with a university education in the modern world is to return to one’s community and devote one’s life to trying to build up a real society out of it and to fight the mob spirit wherever it is. Creating such a society is the main meaning and purpose of human life, and your specialized preparation for it begins here. (“Speech at a Freshman Welcome,” CW 7 280)
A group of individuals, who retain the power and desire of genuine communication, forms a society or community. An aggregate of egos is a mob. A mob can only respond to reflex and cliché; it can only express itself, directly or through a spokesman, in reflex and cliché. A mob always implies some object of resentment, and political leaders who speak for the mob aspect of their society develop a special kind of tantrum style, a style constructed almost entirely out of unexamined clichés. Examples may be heard in the United Nations every day. What is disturbing about the prevalence of bad language in our society is that bad language, if it is the only idiom habitually at command, is really mob language.
What is high style? This is one of the oldest questions in rhetoric: it would almost be possible to translate the title of Longinus’ treatise, Peri Hypsous, written in the second century, by this question. As Longinus recognized, the question has two answers, one for literature and one for speech, or rhetoric. In literature it is correct to translate Longinus’ title as “On the Sublime,” and discuss the great passages in Shakespeare or Milton. In rhetoric high style is something else: something more like the voice of the individual reminding us of our real selves, and of our duty as members of a society and not of a mob. To go at once to the highest example of high style, the sentences of the Sermon on the Mount have nothing in them of the speech-maker’s art: they seem to be coming from inside ourselves, as though the soul itself were remembering what it had been told so long ago. High style in this sense is ordinary style—it can even be “low” style—but in an exceptional situation. In our society it is heard whenever a speaker, like Lincoln at Gettysburg, is honestly struggling to express what his society, as a society, is trying to be and do. It is even more unmistakably heard, as we should expect, in the voice of an individual facing a mob, or some incarnation of the mob spirit, in the death speeches of Vanzetti and Louis Riel, in the dignity with which a New Orleans mother explained her reasons for sending her white child to an unsegregated school. How, marvelled the reporters, did a woman who left school in grade six learn to talk like the Declaration of Independence? It was the authority of high style in action, moving, not on the middle level of thought, but on the higher level of imagination and social vision. The mob’s version of high style is advertising, the verbal art of prodding the reflexes of the ego, and telling it, in a voice choking with emotion, what our vision of society should inspire us to do: to go instantly down to the store and demand this product, accepting no substitutes. As long as society retains its freedom, such advertising is largely harmless, because everybody knows that it is only a kind of ironic game. As soon as society loses its freedom, mob high style becomes what is usually called propaganda, and the moral effects become much more pernicious. (The Well–Tempered Critic, CW 21, 352–3 )
“Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon,” Francesco Granacci, 1494
On this date in 49 BC, returning general Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon into Rome with his army, signalling the start of civil war.
Here’s Frye in Fools of Time with some observations on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar relevant to the issues of social order, social authority and their relation to demagoguery, which we’ve been considering the last couple of days. Money quote: “The good leader individualizes his followers; the tyrant or bad leader intensifies mass energy into a mob.”
This [Elizabethan] view of social order, with its stress on the limited, the finite, and the individual, corresponds, as indicated above, to Nietzsche’s Apollonian vision in Greek culture. That makes it hard for us to understand it. We ourselves live in a Dionysian society, with mass movements sweeping across it, leaders rising and falling, and constantly taking the risk of being dissolved into a featureless tyranny where all sense of the individual disappears. We even live on a Dionysian earth, staggering drunkenly around the sun. The treatment of the citizens in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus puzzles us: we are apt to feel that Shakespeare’s attitude is anti-democratic. In my own graduate-student days during the nineteen-thirties, there appeared an Orson Welles adaptation of Julius Caesar which required the hero to wear a fascist uniform and pop his eyes like Mussolini, and among students there was a good deal of discussion about whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of, say, Coriolanus showed “fascist tendencies” or not. But fascism is a disease of democracy: the fascist leader is a demagogue, and a demagogue is precisely what Coriolanus is not. The demagogues in that play are the tribunes whom the people have chosen as their own managers. The people in Shakespeare constitute a “Dionysian” energy in society: that is, they represent nothing but a potentiality of response to leadership. We are apt to assume, like Brutus, that leadership and freedom threaten one another, but, for us as for Shakespeare, there is no freedom without the sense of the individual, and in the tragic vision, at least, the leader or hero is the primary and original individual. The good leader individualizes his followers; the tyrant or bad leader intensifies mass energy into a mob. Shakespeare has grasped the ambiguous nature of Dionysus in a way that Nietzsche (like D.H. Lawrence later) misses. In no period of history does Dionysus have anything to do with freedom; his function is to release us from the burden of freedom. The last thing that the mob says in both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus is pure Dionysus: “Tear him to pieces.” (18-19)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL5tjGK-x-g
Glenn Beck exhibits his brute talent for race-baiting and incitement to violence
Frye in Words with Power:
When the rhetorical occasion narrows down from the historical to the immediate, as at rallies and pep talks, we begin to see features in rhetoric that account for the suspicion, even contempt, with which it was regarded so often by Plato and Aristotle. Let us take a rhetorical situation at its worst. In intensive rhetoric with a short-term aim, there is a deliberate attempt to put the watchdog of consciousness to sleep, and the steady battering of consciousness become hypnotic, as the metaphor of “swaying” an audience suggests. A repetition of cliche phrases is designed to bring about a form of dissociation. The dead end of all this is the semi-autonomous monster called the mob, of which the speaker is now the shrieking head. For a mob the kind of independent judgment appealed to by dialectic is an act of open defiance, and is normally treated as such.
We spoke of the endlessness of argument in the conceptual area, but rhetoric has an ad hominem or personal weapon available to stop argument. One may be told, “You just say that because you’re an atheist, a Communist, a Jew, a Christian, or because you had a castrating mother,” etc., etc. Such verbal weapons are illegitimate in the conceptual mode, where an impersonal basis is assumed. But they play an important role in ideology–not always a sinister or violent role, as one may also be led to examine one’s position to see what limitations are built into it. (CW 26, 32-3)
That last point is subtle and reassuring. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with ad hominem arguments in the right context — we may indeed be called upon to rethink our stand on issues in light of personal biases. Satire, of course, completely depends upon the ad hominem affront, and it is perhaps the most direct assault on the inadequacies of ideology that literature affords.
And that’s the difference I see between left and right in the most readily available public discourse. The left tweaks the nose of the right with fact-based mockery, and the right responds with death threats and talk of “second amendment remedies,” which predictably leads to violence. The left has Jon Stewart whose satire is usually most devastating when running a piece of footage that provides a missing piece of crucial information; the right has Glenn Beck whose involuted paranoid fantasies seem only intended to leave his audience unmoored and waiting for him to tell them who to hate next. While it’s true that you don’t want to mess with Matt Taibbi, he’ll never threaten you with violence or unleash a horde of angry minions upon you. But if you cross Sarah Palin, she’s capable of putting a target on you while barking “RELOAD” to an already irrational mob. One is acceptable and enriching civilized behavior, the other is psychopathy.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwrzsLYt-uI
John Boehner’s closing remarks before the vote on health care reform last March. It’s important to remember that in John Roberts’s and Antonin Scalia’s America corporations are persons, and that’s Boehner’s real constituency.
Matt Taibbi has a profile of new House Leader, John Boehner, in this week’s Rolling Stone. A taste:
John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich. The biographer who somewhere down the line tackles the question of Boehner’s legacy will do well to simply throw out any references to party affiliation, because the thing that has made Boehner who he is — the thing that has finally lifted him to the apex of legislative power in America — has almost nothing to do with his being a Republican.
The Democrats have plenty of creatures like Boehner. But in the new Speaker of the House, the Republicans own the perfect archetype — the quintessential example of the kind of glad-handing, double-talking, K Street toady who has dominated the politics of both parties for decades. In sports, we talk about athletes who are the “total package,” and that term comes close to describing Boehner’s talent for perpetuating our corrupt and debt-addled status quo: He’s a five-tool insider who can lie, cheat, steal, play golf, change his mind on command and do anything else his lobbyist buddies and campaign contributors require of him to get the job done.
On this date in 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense, which arguably turned the American Rebellion into the American Revolution.
Here’s Frye in a letter to Helen in July 1932:
Now the United States is a big thing to criticize, but it has the advantage of having so many aspects that it is hardly possible to make a criticism of it which is not more or less true. But a statement which is more or less true, like “Germans are more intelligent than Frenchmen,” or “women are more moral than men,” is meaningless and a waste of wind, and of what is of considerably more value, time. That is the objection I have to Dreiser, and, on principle, to Lewis. No man has adequate cultural equipment to satirize the U.S. according to it, so that all he can do is imitate, or simply set the standardization of the Babbitts beside his own cultural standardization. There is too much eighteenth-century sentimentality and sloppy thinking in American culture anyway, and the path from Thomas Paine to Elmer Gantry runs straight and smooth. (CW 1, 41)
And from Elmer Gantry to creatures like Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin who believe that the second amendment supercedes the first — especially when advocates for the first amendment aren’t particularly eager enthusiasts of the second.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9GXil9Vm8
Failed Tea Party senatorial candidate Sharron Angle can’t stop talking about “second amendment remedies”
Palin would clearly like images like these to disappear down the memory hole. You won’t find them at any of her sites after today. This suggests a guilty conscience. Because if they really didn’t have anything to do with today’s murderous assault (which will no doubt be the endlessly repeated talking point), then why must they be made to disappear?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v–IqqusnNQ
“Is There Life On Mars?”
Today is David Bowie’s 64th birthday.
Here’s approximately 40 years worth of music. Even this small sample reveals an enviable body of work, and everybody will have reason to complain that a personal favorite has been left out. Mine include “Is There Life on Mars?” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” from the early period, and “Afraid of Americans” and “Thursday’s Child” from the late. But the one song that continues to amaze me is “Golden Years.” It was recorded in 1975 but could have been released at just about any time over the past thirty-five years and still sound like it was being served hot. The leavening agent of pastiche is about as fully realized here as it ever is in Bowie: doo wop background vocals performed with skin tight harmonies, Prussian-disciplined finger-snapping and hand-clapping to tease out the syncopated funk rhythms, three stray grace notes produced by what may only be programmed to sound like a harmonica, and Bing Crosby-like whistling in the outro. Does anybody else know how to collate such vagrant elements into a song that you also want to dance to? Plus he wrote the heartbreaking “All the Young Dudes” and then gave it to Mott the Hoople to render as the life-affirming anthem for those who still retain the ambition to carry the news.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is dead is in critical condition. Others are reported to have died, including a nine year old girl. Above is a campaign notice from Giffords’s Tea Party opponent last summer.
Andrew Sullivan is live-blogging on developments here.