John Skelton

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skelton

On this date John Skelton died (1460-1529).

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

As a result of the change of rhythm, the native four-beat line came into the foreground again.  At the court of Henry VIII, John Skelton developed the “skeltonic” rhythm which has been named after him, a rhythm closer to nursery rhyme, ballad, and popular poetry of all kinds than perhaps any other equally important poet has produced.  One result of this, of a type not uncommon among experimental poets, was that it was not until well on in the twentieth century that he was regarded as an important poet at all.  The English four-beat line was, we said, split in two by a mid-line caesura; hence Old English poetry could be printed as a series to two-beat lines by a slight change in typography.  The skeltonic is rhythmically the Old English half-line revived, although a clanging rhythm has been added:

For though my rhyme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rain-beaten,

Rusty and moth-eaten,

If ye take well therewith,

It hath in it some pith.  [Colin Clout II. 53-8]

Such a rhythm is logical, if extreme, of accentual tendencies, and is an excellent vehicle for the violent satire and grotesque realism that usually accompanied it in Skelton.  (CW 10, 14)

Frye’s “Closed Mythology” of Authoritarianism

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPELTY6vSqk

Former Nixon aide John Dean talks about “proto-fascist tendencies” in the Bush administration and the Republican party

There is a lot of discussion these days among concerned old-school American conservatives about the “epistemic closure” that has become so apparent in the Rush Limbaugh-Fox News universe; that what now passes for conservatism in America is actually an antic form of nihilism that believes in nothing but obtaining and holding on to power at any cost.  Its chief weapons are the propagation of lies, confusion, fear, and resentment.  It is notable that two of the leading voices on the issue of epistemic closure are not American born and raised: one’s an ex-pat Brit, Andrew Sullivan, and the other an ex-pat Canadian, David Frum — both from countries with a strong, moderating Tory tradition.

I was a little disappointed to find that Frye evidently has nothing to say about Theodor Adorno and his notion of the “authoritarian personality,” but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least glance at how Adorno and his co-authors frame the issue. The traits of the authoritarian personality are common and readily identifiable.  Those traits are:  “conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness,” destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sexuality (sexual repression).”  The authoritarian personality is therefore highly predisposed to follow the dictates of a strong leader and traditional, conventional values.

Does this really require much elaboration?  We see these symptoms being played out on the right every day, and the further right you go, the more pathological the behavior becomes.  Take just one example, “exaggerated concerns over sexuality (sexual repression).”  It has become part of our satirical lore over the last few years that, the more homophobic the Republican/conservative/evangelical leader is, the more likely he will be outed for engaging in closeted homosexual activity (nicely bringing the principle of “projectivity” into play).  The list is too long and the details too sad to bother lingering over.  But if you are somehow unaware of the phenomenon, here’s a short list of some of the more notorious figures: Rev. Ted Haggard, Sen. Larry Craig, Dr. and Rev. George Rekers.  They’ve added to our lexicon phrases such as “wide stance” and “long stroke.”  The case of Rekers, the most recent outing, is especially disturbing because he’s both a psychiatrist and a minister — as well as the co-founder of the repulsive Family Research Council — who for decades has claimed that homosexuality is a psychological disorder that can be treated and “cured.”  In May he was spotted returning from a ten day European vacation with a 20 year old male prostitute who confirmed sexual relations with Rekers.

The self-destructiveness of the authoritarian personality would be a matter of pity if it weren’t so devastating in its wider social implications.  The epistemic closure of the authoritarian mindset will collapse in on itself eventually — but, as demonstrated by the recent world-wide financial meltdown brought about by derivative instruments designed ultimately only to make money for the brokers, the wider public is not necessarily spared the consequences.

Frye has his own version of epistemic closure, which in The Modern Century he calls a “closed mythology”:

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Oxford

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Merton College, Oxford

On this date in 1214 The University of Oxford received its charter.

Frye attended Merton College (established 1264), completing his studies for an MA in the spring of 1939.  During the summer and fall of 1982 Frye was interviewed by Valerie Schatzker as part of an oral history of the University of Toronto.  Here he talks about his experience at Oxford.

Schaztker: How did [study there] compare with what you remember from the Honour Course [at Victoria College]?

Frye: It was very largely a repetition of what I’d done.  I read more intensively, but, as I said, my real reason for taking it was that I wanted to become fresher in the whole English area.  If you ask about instruction: of course it was tutorial, and my tutor was Edmund Blunden, who was a rather shy, diffident man.  For some bloody reason, which I’ve never figured out, he was pro-Nazi.  I didn’t know who was to blame for that.  But in any case, I seemed to meet fascists everywhere I turned at Oxford, so I was poltically and socially extremely unhappy for that time that I was there.  England’s morale seemed to be the lowest in its history.  If you read Howard K. Smith’s Last Train From Berlin (he’s a CBS announcer, and he was a classmate of mine at Oxford), the first chapter is about his experiences at Merton College and it will give you some idea of what I myself found extremely uncongenial about the place…

It may have been pure accident.  But if I found myself just meeting people casually, I seemed to keep running into fascist groups all the time.  I knew that the Labour group was the largest single group at Oxford, but the general feeling at Merton, certainly, and I think at several other colleges as well, was very much not to my liking…

I wouldn’t say that it was more politially active, but the undercurrents were beginning to swirl around and they were very ugly ones.  There was one man who had gone up to Merton on a scholarship which had been donated by Oswald Mosely [of the British Union of Fascists] and his job was to recruit people as far as he could.  I felt that if England had not been forced into an anti-Hitler position it would have gone in a very sinister direction or at least the intellectual leadership would have done so.

Schatzker: Did you find yourself ostracized?

Frye: No, I didn’t.  That’s too strong a word.  I didn’t find myself ostrasized.  And of course there were very intense left-wing people both in Merton College and elsewhere.  Howard Smith was one, and another was a tough egg from Yorkshire who came home drunk to his room and found four or five Fascists roughing it up.  So his head cleared and he went into action and pretty soon the air was thick with Fascists flying out of windows. (CW 24, 599-600)

Quote of the Day: Frye on “1984”

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1984

From the “Foreward to 1984″ (1967):

“It would be a great mistake to assume that 1984 simply exhibits Communism to us like a monkey cage in a zoo, with the aim of making us feel more complacent about our superior liberties.  The book shows us not a monkey cage but a mirror.  Its society is the logical form of what a great many of us have already shown that we want.  One of the things that most disgusted Orwell was the masochism of some of the intellectuals around him, who thought that any totalitarian government was better than democracy because it was more logical.  Those who were pro-Communist ignored or explained away all the evidence that Stalin’s government was brutal, corrupt, and treacherous.  In other words they were willing to rewrite history in terms of their own prejudices.  The history incorporated into 1984 remarks that most of the intellectuals in the democracies had become authoritarian by 1940, and there is far too much truth in that statement.  Or, again, take McCarthyism, something that grew up after Orwell’s book.  I have read many letters in American papers defending McCarthy, and what most of them said in effect was: “Communism is such a danger that it doesn’t matter if his accusations are true or not; how are we going to feel protected unless somebody is constantly being denounced?”  That attitude was exactly the attitude that makes Big Brother possible.  Nobody wants to have the tortures and spying of that world applied to himself, but many of us would feel more comfortable if we knew that they were being applied to someone else who we could think of as dangerous.  The fact that the world’s most powerful  democracy let McCarthy get away with pure bluff year after year did not indicate a fear of losing freedom to Communism; what it indicated was a fear of freedom itself.”  (CW 29, 281)

Saturday Night at the Movies: “1984”

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The 1984 film adaptation of 1984.  I cannot embed this video, but you may watch it in very high quality and in full at Google Video here.

The film was actually shot in the industrial ruins of England during the same time period of the events depicted.  It’s a very powerful little movie made at a time when the Brits still made such movies.  Note the propaganda film being shown during the opening “two minutes hate” sequence.  The first minute of it sure looks familiar.  Authoritarianism of the left and authoritarianism of the right end up in much the same place.

After the jump, the 1954 BBC production of the novel, if you’d prefer something more vintage.

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The Volkish Kitsch of Sun News

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzbN-P8NfM4

The cartoonish patriotic rhetoric of the Sun News promotional video posted Thursday — with its apparently out of nowhere military snaredrum motif that actually seems like an involuntarily blurted out confession of intent — is suggestive of the template for all such films.  These people too were “strong” and “proud” and occupied “the greatest place on earth,” as the Sun News people characterize Canada.  The formula is unmistakable and familiar: boilerplate nationalist narrative, lots and lots of sentimental images of mountains, lakes, and people dressed in native costume (whether lederhosen or cowboy hats), and music used alternately to reassure and to rouse.  Oh, and flags.  Flags, flags, flags, flags, flags.  It’s the semiotics of the inarticulate and easily led.

I harp on this because it is impossible to overlook at this late date what just two men — Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes — have done to degrade the state of reporting in the U.S. in little more than a decade, turning public discourse into a mad scramble of talking points and public opinion contests to be won or lost every news cycle.  Murdoch and Ailes have demonstrated that we can never be complacent about this noxious form of hidden-in-plain-sight plutocracy.  It’s not okay.  It’s never okay.  It costs us more than we can afford to lose at the best of times, and these are not the best of times: 1% of the population now possesses more wealth than the “bottom” 80%.  The attitude of the new right increasingly seems to be that only they are allowed opinions, and only their opinions have any basis in truth.  Their primary tactic is the shouting down or shutting out of dissent, either directly or (much more insidiously) indirectly through the brute accumulation of misrepresentation and lies and ginned up resentment.   As we’ve seen with Fox News, it leads very quickly to the denial of verifiable evidence altogether.  How else to account for the daily insanity that is Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin?  How else to explain that the hate-mongering of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly — not to mention a distressing (and apparently increasing) number of elected Republicans — has become an accepted part of America’s weekly fare?  We don’t need that here.

Salman Rushdie

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2eWKH-F4Y

Salman Rushdie on The Hour with George Stromboulopoulos

Today is Salman Rushdie‘s birthday (born 1947).  Rushdie, of course, was subjected to a death sentence by the Iranian Supreme Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14th, 1989 for his novel The Satanic Verses.  Frye makes reference to it in his last posthumously published work, The Double Vision.

I am, of course, isolating only one element in Christianity, but cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always mean that God has been replaced by the devil, and such things are always accompanied by a false kind of literalism.  At present some other religions, notably Islam, are even less reassuring than our own.  As Marxist and American imperialisms decline, the Muslim world is emerging as the chief threat to world peace, and the spark-plug of its intransigence, so to speak, is its fundamentalism or false literalism of belief.  The same principle of demonic perversion applies here: when Khomeini gave the order to have Salman Rushdie murdered, he was turning the whole of the Koran into Satanic verses.  In our own culture, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a future New England in which a reactionary religious movement has brought back the hysteria, bigotry, and sexual sadism of seventeenth-century Puritanism.  Such a development may seem unlikely just now, but the potential is all there.  (CW 4, 177-8)

Twenty years later, the potential only seems more potent.

TGIF: “The Jeannie Tate Show”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iw1uEVaQpA

The Jeannie Tate Show, with guest Bill Hader

Soccer mom Jeannie Tate (Liz Cackowski) hosts a talk show from her mini van in this WB web series.  Her troubled step-daughter and co-host, Tina Tate, is played by Parks and Recreation‘s Aubrey Plaza.

After the jump, the Hillary Clinton Election Special edition of the show, an extra credit project for Tina Tate’s civics class.

Jeannie Tate’s website here.

Aubrey Plaza’s video website here.  (Aubrey is scary funny.  Be sure to check out her parodies of MTV reality series in “Daddy’s Little Judge” and “Kaplowee.”)

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Quote of the Day: Frye on Mulroney

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlkEkyS3gOQ

Mulroney’s dramatic call for a Royal Commission to clear his good name starts to go awry . . .

In his notes for “Levels of Cultural Identity,” Frye says early on:

De Tocqueville says almost nothing about Canada, even though most of the people there in his day spoke his native language, but he does have one wonderful sentence I want to quote: it describes the Mulroney regime perfectly. (CW 25, 231)

That sentence is:

In Canada the most enlightened, patriotic and humane inhabitants make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content them . . . more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. (Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley [New York: Knopf, 1960], 1:296–7 [chap. 8].)

Video of the Day

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Graft pays an unexpected, WTF?, dividend

Rep. Joe Barton (Republican, Texas) apologizes to BP CEO Tony Hayward yesterday for the “20 billion dollar shakedown” that BP, poor lambs, suffered at the hands of the White House.

“I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown.  In this case, a 20 billion dollar shakedown.”

That’s the “tragedy of the first proportion” in this whole affair?  That “a private corporation” be required to pay — with money — for the ruin and suffering and loss of life and livelihood that transpire as a direct result of its own criminal negligence?

Barton is not only in the pay of big oil, as would be expected, it turns out (surprise!) he’s their top earner across two decades.  From Reuters:

Barton is the biggest recipient of oil and gas industry campaign contributions in the House of Representatives, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Its data showed that Barton has collected $1,447,880 from political action committees and individuals connected with the oil and gas industry since 1989.