Entries Tagged 'earnestness' ↓

… your fictional daughter killed you and thought of putting your body in the freezer but couldn’t manage it and NYTBR reviewer Lee Siegel (among others) allegedly misunderstood a plot point in your book and now he’s supposed to feel bad?

I think not.

Let me take readers back four and a half decades to see how unbearably priggish and tragically humor-challenged and literal-minded—not to mention morally correct—Americans have become [e.a.]:

Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad while he was studying European theater [in 1961] on a postgraduate travel scholarship earned at Harvard. … As its subtitle indicated, he wrote the play as a parody— ‘‘a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition‘‘—in the new, avant garde French theater of Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. It was this subgenre of the theater that, in 1961, Martin Esslin labeled the Theatre of the Absurd. …

The offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan— caused some critics to complain about a lack of serious purpose in the play as well as its derivative elements, but the farcical and fanciful treatment of an overly-protective, domineering mother and her neurotic son gave New York and European audiences little pause. Most commentators could not argue with success and found the play [an] engaging spoof of everything from Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo to Freudian psychology.

I haven’t read Sebold’s novel, but judging from the words of her Little, Brown publicist, Heather Fain, Siegel hit Sebold’s Achilles’ heel.

Fain (quoted in GalleyCat):

The main concern that Fain voiced when we spoke about the review yesterday was that the “mom’s in the freezer” spin might be “making light of the macabre nature of the subject matter, …”

Siegel:

Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. … Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.

Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.

Surely the moral conundrum is the murder itself and not what the fictional daughter does with her fictional mother’s body after the murder. But  publicist Fain is doing what she’s supposed to do: she deflects criticism away from her trying-to-have-it-both-ways author and tries to place blame on the shoulders of that author’s righteous critics.

However, Siegel is calling bullshit precisely on Sebold’s attempt to be both deliciously transgressive and morally serious:

Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you’re almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales.

Moral seriousness is not about your subject matter. It’s about how you handle your subject matter.

So. I’m back and I’m mellow—probably because I have studiously avoided catching up on the blogospheric eruptions that I missed while I was away (though I did follow the news, at a vast remove, in the International Herald Tribune, which, shockingly, costs € 2,20 [approx $3.10]; more later on following the news at a vast remove).

Among others, I had P. G. Wodehouse for company on my European idyll, and these words, from Psmith in the City, written in 1910, also helped to lighten my mood [e.a.]:

All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. …

The electors of Kenningford who really had any definite opinions on politics were fairly equally divided. There were about as many earnest Liberals as there were earnest Unionists. But besides these there was a strong contingent who did not care which side won. These looked on elections as Heaven-sent opportunities for making a great deal of noise. They attended meetings in order to extract amusement from them; and they voted, if they voted at all, quite irresponsibly. A funny story at the expense of one candidate told on the morning of the polling, was quite likely to send these brave fellows off in dozens filling in their papers for the victim’s opponent.

[Penguin; pp. 56-57]

In 1910, there was no Feiler Faster Thesis to explain (courtesy of Mickey Kaus) that candidates (and their campaign strategists) needn’t fret about not having enough time to connect with voters.

Even a century ago it was understood that only at the last minute do voters give political campaigns their

allotted minute and a half of concentrated thought.

Except: even a century ago Wodehouse knew that the great unwashed among voters don’t give candidates their thought.

They vote with their gut.

And they are likely to be swayed not by facts but by—dare I say it?—infotainment [that is: gossip, rumor, fabrication, PRopaganda^TM or anything else that makes for a more entertaining story than what reality, and a factual rendering of it, can deliver].

Upshot: time isn’t the crucial problem for candidates. As always, perception is the problem. Image is the problem. (Then, of course, there’s the little issue of connecting with the public’s mood.)

It’s not fair.

It’s not right.

It could lead us where we definitely don’t want to go.

It’s likely to offer dismal results for those of us “earnest Liberals” who want to vote for Obama—or, rather, to live in a world where Obama’s views hold sway.

But that’s the way it is.

Americans may watch a lot of TV, but the news isn’t a big part of their menu. The Pew Research Center tracked the news habits of Americans over the twenty-year period from 1986 to 2006 and concluded that

the average percentage of adult Americans following all stories “very closely” is 26%. …[This] suggests that, at least with respect to most day-to-day reporting, the American news audience is only modestly interested

Of the stories they followed, these were the most popular types:

disasters 39% followed very closely

money 34

conflict 33

political news 22

tabloid news 18

foreign news 17

Of particular interest to those of us interested in news-as-infotainment are this counterintuitive gem (p. 5):

Disaster News rivets audiences. … Tabloid News fails to do the same.

Journalists might well predict and easily accept that disaster stories always “sell.” But journalists might not predict that tabloid reporting sells so poorly. … Skepticism notwithstanding, both of these patterns of news interest have manifested themselves repeatedly during the last three decades: Disaster News engages audiences; Tabloid News, not so much.

This finding is more predictable, to me at least (p. 3):

Conflict News—stories about war, terrorism, and social violence—consistently elicits much more news attention than does Tabloid or even Political News.

Conflict—protagonist vs. antagonist—is the sine qua non of storytelling. TV “news” trafficks in these stories. They boil down complex issues into bite-size pieces. The result is lacking in nutrition, but it’s tasty. And it satisfies our need (a human need—that is to say: nonpartisan) to have easy answers, even (perhaps especially) when there is no easy answer.

These answers—the comfortable certainties of partisans on both sides—are provided both by pop culture (deliberate entertainment) and by infotainment (news served up via entertainment values), which, while serving people’s desire for distraction and need to be entertained, also imparts some information, rallies the faithful, infuriates the opposition, and ensures an audience hungry for more bread and circuses.

I mention this not because it’s the theme of this blog. Not this time anyway. I intend it as a response to Shadi Hamid, who, in response to this post of mine, wonders why liberals can’t educate the electorate rather than respond to it.

I responded in the comments, but I’ve got more to say, if you’ll permit me to equate, even if just for the sake of the argument, the electorate with the news-viewing (or non-news viewing) audience. At the very least, these two groups overlap.

The Pew Center’s study makes one of my points for me: the electorate isn’t looking to get educated—it’s looking to be entertained. At any given time, about 75% of the television audience (many voters, presumably) are not watching the news (which is where we’re likely to be offered the kind of information affecting policy that Hamid wants to get across to people).

When they are watching “news,” mostly they’re mostly interested in rubber-necking the tragedies of others (disasters) or in tracking their finances (or prospects for making or losing money) or in being spectators to some kind of fight (conflict). They just don’t want to know from government policies (much less foreign policy, which is among the categories of least interest to Americans,+++ along with celebrity and political scandals ***).

Louis Menand, in his July 9 New Yorker review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, makes another point for me.

Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.” [e.a.]

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). …

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith,

I note that Caplan is an economist, and addresses only the economic prejudices of voters. But if Caplan is right about this—and I think he’s on to something—the electorate would be expected to have other prejudices, too. (I recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on the subject of contemporary prejudices.)

It is some of those prejudices that Rudy Giuliani is appealing to, both in his public image and in the foreign-policy stances outlined in his Foreign Affairs article. Whatever, he’s doing, by the way, it’s working (and note that his strongest opponent is Hillary Clinton, who is the most hawkish among the Democrats).

Hamid’s problem—the problem of all ideologues trying to sway the public this way or that through a cogent debate about the issues—is that people have prejudices. They are not necessarily open to reason; rather, they’re given to emotional responses. To me, Americans seem to be feeling rather more hawkish than dovish—which was where I entered the conversation with Hamid.

—————-

+++ This particular finding is a bee in my bonnet. Americans have always been wrapped up in themselves. But the extent to which they continue to be wrapped up in themselves post-9/11, in the face of all we have learned since then about the dangerous world outside our shores and in the face of all we have to do to engage with that world, is nothing short of astonishing to me.

But then Caplan suggests a reason for that in his book, too. Menand writes:

Even apart from ignorance of the basic facts, most people simply do not think politically. … And, over time, individuals give different answers to the same questions about their political opinions. People simply do not spend much time learning about political issues or thinking through their own positions. They may have opinions—if asked whether they are in favor of capital punishment or free-trade agreements, most people will give an answer—but the opinions are not based on information or derived from a coherent political philosophy. They are largely attitudinal and ad hoc.

[e.a.]

*** It would be interesting to examine what accounts for the amount of interest in the various categories. My guess about the audience’s lack of interest in celebrity and political scandals is that people expect celebrities and politicians to behave badly. We may fawn over them, but when they get in trouble …yawn. It’s dog-bites-man: not news worth following.

Tell me something I don’t know or didn’t expect: that is something I’ll watch.

Just the other day, in reference to John Kerry paying his respects to Iran’s Khatami at Davos, I was saying that

what is “acceptable” in political discourse changes faster than you can say “homophobe” (or “Islamophobe” or “anti-Semite“). And that what is “acceptable” behavior from the domestic political opposition changes faster than you can say “visiting Assad in Syria” or “paying respect to Iran’s Supreme Shithead ….”

That got no further play in the media—I guess no one cares, because Kerry is out of the presidential race. (Well, someone cares about cares about Kerry, but my post on that will have to wait for another day.)

However—you knew there was a however, right?—Joe Biden is in hot water (considered all but dead one day after announcing that he’s running for president) for making this remark about Barack Obama:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

This is a major event in the leftosphere, and cool-as-a-cucumber Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED helpfully explains how we’re going to have to start policing our language now that we’ve got a black man and a woman running for president:

[N]ow that we have the first credible African-American and female presidential candidates in American history running, I think we’re going to learn that many of the common formulations we use to talk about ourselves and our politics can sound tin-eared at best — and downright offensive, at worst — when discussing African-American or female subjects.

And why should we watch our mouths? Because too many cooks spoil the broth. Or something. (I know it has something to do with hot liquid refreshment):

The issue isn’t just Biden being an insensitive boob, but rather that commonly used words and phrases activate different frames — remember that whole discussion? — in different contexts, and that women and African-Americans live in a verbally constraining soup of negative frames.

Forget what Biden said. He’s an idiot.

What is Franke-Ruta’s excuse for sounding like, you know, Ari Fleischer trying to intimidate Bill Maher on September 26, 2001?

Well, she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks a healthy national debate over “negative frames” will emerge.

This is going to seriously damage some public figures, such as Biden. But, overall, I think that it will be a healthy process for American society to undergo, and that we are going to learn an unusual amount about ourselves, as well as about the candidates seeking to lead us.

Hahahahahaha! Excuse me while I go count the days until I can start collecting Social Security. In the words of the immortal Maurice Chevalier (update: not to mention Lerner and Loewe!):

“I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”