Author Archives: Michael Happy

Video of the Day: “There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are only dollars”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B1uF9gmkVw

Everyone remembers Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell” speech from Network. But, while less viscerally memorable, this speech by Beale’s corporate nemesis, Arthur Jensen, is the movie’s darkly revealed core.

Network got it exactly right about the decline of television news into infotainment based upon already discernible trends in the early 1970s, right down to the frenzied pursuit of profit, whatever the social cost, as represented now by Fox News. But the movie also got it right about transnational corporatism, whose fundamental principles are lucidly laid out in the clip above.

Government representing the actual interests of actual citizens is a threatened species, which is suggested by the hoarding-insect behavior of an increasing number of politicians. Our votes are gradually devolving into the means by which the more cynical elements of the political class gain access to power (typically through progressively unhinged demagoguery), and whose single-minded purpose is to promote commercial interests at the expense of everything else, including the institution of government itself. Conservatives especially know that, just as it is easier to lie than to tell the truth, it is much easier to cut taxes to the richest of the rich than it is to reclaim that lost revenue from them somewhere down the line. Just look at the Bush tax cuts in the States. Those “temporary” cuts are, at the moment, the single greatest threat to an economy that could shed its deficit burden almost completely just by letting them lapse as they were supposed to do in the first place. As it is, the current Republican “debate” on budget cuts revolves around dismantling Medicare while, of course, providing still more top end tax cuts.

It promises to get worse before we can think about it getting even marginally better. Most of the population is still living in a world where political authorities are trusted to a minimally acceptable degree. It seems they will only be disabused of that misplaced trust one bloody insult and injury at a time. People understandably want to feel that their elected representatives have some residual sense of duty to them. On the right side of the political spectrum most notably, it’s getting harder to find any sign at all to suggest that might still be true.

The world we live in is looking more and more like the dysfunctional state described in the monologue above: no national or personal interests, just corporate ones in a multi-national sacrifice-ritual of saps who think they have elected governments to (snicker) “represent” them. Our elected officials are more openly go-getters in the exciting new world of transnational economies, where national wealth is just one more resource to cheat out of the suckers who haven’t figured that out yet.

So watch the clip above. Listen to what is said, and see if you don’t recognize it as a frighteningly rendered version of a world that is already way more familiar to us than it should be. (As sometimes happens, this video cannot be embedded: click on the image and hit the YouTube link.)

Harold Lloyd

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEcTjhUN_7U

One of the greatest bits ever committed to film during the silent era

Today is Harold Lloyd‘s birthday (1893-1971). Frye was a fan as a child. Above is the signature Lloyd routine from Safety Last!

An earlier post on Frye’s love of silent movies here. Bob Denham’s compilation, “Frye and the Movies,” here.

The movie that haunted the young Frye here.

Benjamin Disraeli: True Blue Conservative

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yrPtRgK6Gk Disraeli addresses Parliament in Mrs. Brown

Benjamin Disraeli died on this date in 1881 (born 1804).

It cannot be said too often: North American politicians who call themselves “conservatives” are no such thing.  They are corporatists. Below is some of the notable legislation passed during the arch-conservative Disraeli’s ministry. This is what the record of a real conservative looks like: offering assistance to those in need in the name of social stability; promoting justice for the sake of sound social health. Just the titles of this legislation might give contemporary “conservatives” a Victorian case of the vapors. Where are the tax cuts for the rich and for corporations? Where is the corporate welfare? Disraeli extended the franchise, offered assistance to the poor, and enhanced the rights and protections of workers, including the right to form trades unions:

Artisans’ and Laborers’ Dwellings Improvement Act

Public Health Act

Factory Acts

Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act

In response to these reforms, Liberal-Labour MP Alexander Macdonald told his constituents in 1879: “The Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.”

It would raise hurricanes of laughter all along the political spectrum to suggest that today’s “conservatives” might do anything remotely resembling this now.

Maybe a large part of the reason is that Disraeli was extraordinarily accomplished. However “conservatives” regard themselves, glad handing the corporate elite does not round out a world-view.

Here’s Frye making reference in “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours” to Disraeli the novelist; a writer who gives expression to the enduring foundations of romance, despite the conventional thinking:

In general, [it is assumed that] the serious Victorian fiction writers are realistic and the less serious ones are romancers. We expect George Eliot or Trollope to give us a solid and well-rounded realization of the social life, attitudes, and intellectual issues of their time; we expect Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, because they are more “romantic,” to give us the same kind of thing in a more flighty and dilettantish way; from the cheaper brands, Marie Corelli or Ouida, we expect nothing but the standard romance formulas. (CW 10, 287)

As Frye goes on to say in his examination of the work of Dickens, the second-tier status of romance is a long way from the truth. Writers of romance like Disraeli are closer to the imaginative bedrock of literature and life than any realist. “Conservatives” who by denying assistance to the poor and justice to society at large to further enrich a bogus crony-capitalisim may flatter themselves as living in “the real world.” But it is in fact not much of a world and, because it’s unsustainable, it is not even real; just temporarily realized and doomed to fail.

The Canterbury Tales

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knZ65pBRcg

Offered up as a curiosity: an excerpt from the Wife of Bath sequence from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1972 film, I racconti di Canterbury. This barely passes as “adaptation,” but it’s gaudy and ridiculous, and maybe those qualities indirectly capture some of the tale’s bawdy spirit. Also, the great Italian actress Laura Betti plays the Wife of Bath — and, as part of the curiosity, Tom Baker, better known as one of the best incarnations of Dr Who, plays one of her husbands

Geoffrey Chaucer recited the Canterbury Tales in the court of Richard II for the first time on this date in 1397.

Here’s Frye’s stark assessment of Chaucer’s Retraction:

Then we find a Retraction at the end, where Chaucer, with a dismally pious snuffle, pleads forgiveness for having written his poetry. Now this is no joke. There is no room in the same poem for both this Retraction and the rest of the work: the most eclectic reader could not extend Chaucer’s moral standards for that. To us The Miller’s Tale is great art and thoroughly good in the Platonic sense of the word: it is the Retraction that appears to us as a grotesquely leering obscenity. It is, of course, customary to invoke the Middle Ages at this point, and say that Chaucer lived at a time when it was generally considered meritorious to make such an exhibition of oneself. But that is far too easy-going. When Chaucer started out he made no concessions to medievalism: he defended his own coarseness by saying that Jesus Himself did not hesitate at coarseness when occasion demanded, and that those who wished to be holier than Jesus could simply read something else. Morally, this defence and its retraction are mutually exclusive. The man who made the Miller, Reeve, Friar, Summoner, and Pardoner was a creator, a worthy servant of the Creator-God who presumably looked, in the Garden of Eden, upon the hinder parts of a she-ape and saw that it was very good. The writer of the Retraction is accepting the moral standards of the Summoner and Pardoner at their face value, with all the hypocrisy and vulgarity they imply. This is something absolutely different from the conclusion of Troilus and Cresyde: there, the great artist rejected the world; here, a canting Worldly Wiseman is rejecting great art. (CW 10, 135)

Johnson’s Dictionary

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Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language on this date in 1755.

Frye in “Rencontre: The General Editor’s Introduction”:

The third in this trio [the other two being Dryden and Swift] of the great age of prose Samuel Johnson, who, thanks to Boswell, is even more famous as a talker than as a writer. This is evidence, if we needed it, that the association of good prose style with good conversation is a social fact, not merely an educational ideal. As we should expect from the author of a dictionary, Johnson has an enormous vocubulary, and his use of it is a further indication of the growing polysyllabic quality of English speech, already mentioned. But though a formidable social figure, and satirized in his own day as “Pomposo,” he is not at all a pompous writer: he consistently directs his reader’s attention to the subject, not to himself. (CW 10, 60-1)