Fads, Fools, And Grand Guignol In America–The Credulousness Of The Cause-Obsessed

Black Lives Matter has come and gone, a victim of COVID, Afghanistan, the border, and abortion.  It is now at the back of the media bus and relegated to the Style section of the Washington Post. There are still a few weathered BLM signs on lawns in progressive white neighborhoods; but the Black Lives Matter sheets and banners draped from second story windows have all been taken down; and for all intents and purposes the movement never existed.  Not only have its signs been removed in favor of trellises and Halloween decorations, but all traces of BLM are gone.

Such is the bandwagon nature of America.  Nothing is really that serious or permanent. Causes are Thanksgiving Day parades and big tent revivals.  They come and go, feel good for a time and then are forgotten. Life is too short to hang your hat on the same peg, wear the same suit, or dance the rhumba at every party. 

Buddhists say that there is no change but change – the ephemeral is not worth our attention – but change is a part of the American litany.  Our republican tenure is too short to see history as mattering much.  Our culture is nothing compared to Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Versailles, or the Vatican.  Change is our lifeblood, our meme, our chapter and verse; so it is no surprise that everything comes, gives pause, goes, and is forgotten.

There are always a few hangers-on, those dyed-in-the-wool progressive partisans who absolutely, truly, and fundamentally believe that the calling out of white supremacy is long overdue.  For too many decades, they say, the black man has suffered under the yoke of racist, backwoods, bass boat crackers.  His struggle can never be ignored.

Most others have given notice.   Black people have had their say.  We get it, now please go home.  And home they went.  The streets are once again quiet, angry black faces are off the front pages, attention has turned elsewhere, and nothing, absolutely nothing has changed. 

The dysfunctionality of the inner city remains the norm.  The problem of racial disparity and social inequality has not disappeared.  The howls of protest and angry demonstrations have done nothing except up the ante for walkin’ around money and lip service.  A local Washington, DC columnist noted that in the 40 years he has lived in the city, the problems of the black community have gotten worse, not better - systemic dysfunction, he said.

Now that COVID is under control, the ‘I Love Dr. Fauci’ signs are coming down in neighborhoods.  He is a has been, a supernumerary, a little doctor with big opinions who has had his day in the sun and his fifteen minutes of fame.  Now that vaccines are everywhere and the pandemic is headed for the corral, Fauci and the CDC are gone.  

Those citizens who were on the front lines of Maskism and social distancing, the first to call out J’accuse! at noncompliant neighbors and stand like sentinels six feet apart in open air parks and gardens (‘An example must be set’) have a new cudgel – the irresponsible anti-vaxxer reprobates who deny science, spit at the majority, reject the commonweal and infect others. 

This cause will soon disappear, but the need for social recognition, an acknowledgement of righteousness and good action will not. There will always be new barriers to storm, and these warriors are as happy as can be that their moral mettle will be tested on yet another existential issue.

The State of Texas recently took another legal step to limit abortions, and a cause that had been relegated to the back pages was once again front and center.  The same virulent, intemperate, hostile, and vicious attacks that had been launched against Donald Trump were now hurled at the state’s governor, its legislators, and its citizens.  A woman’s right to choose was being abrogated and soon would disappear.  Feminism would suffer, women of the world would be once again in chattels, locked in, abused and shuttered by ignorant men.  

The hysteria was operatic, grand guignol at its best; but Texas remains adamant, choosing to act in the democratic interests of its electorate, reflect its moral judgement and stand firm against liberal cant and political excess.

Once the fol-de-rol is over, and the issue gets shunted to the courts, put aside and out of the way, Texas and abortion will no longer be news – except for the same inveterate social justice legionaries who cannot let go. 

Greta Thunberg was once a media darling.  A young ingenue with a cause, an adolescent soldier in the fight against global warming, she was everyone’s poster child.  Her image was everywhere, she was global and universal; but then she disappeared.  Her hopes of Hollywood, celebrity, continued fame and fortune dried up.  She was now just a boring, tedious teenager whom most wanted to disappear. 

A good progressive gains status, privilege, and respect the more he belongs to purposeful causes.  Many older progressives cut their teeth on civil rights and the war in Vietnam; but once those causes lost traction, they were quick to embrace new ones.  Race, gender, and ethnicity as part of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ filled the moral void and gave progressives a renewed voice in the name of social justice and moral rectitude.  

Global warming soon followed, and the most politically attuned progressives found ways to fold race, gender, and ethnicity under the climate change umbrella.  If any one issue were to luff, there would be many other to take up the slack.  Such emotional partisans were catholic in their causes – any one would do because investment in it was more a matter of personal validation and self-worth than actual change.  Fads and the variability and temporality of issues makes no difference to the progressive activist.

The Women’s March is a potpourri of faddish progressive demands.  Every issue from equal pay to abortion rights, to sexual abuse, male patriarchy, transgenderism, and the capitalist system itself was represented on the Mall. Collective progressive solidarity.  It matters little whether protests and marches will have any impact.  The point is sharing in a common, philosophical, universal movement.

When asked about the specific purpose of their protests, demonstrators often answer, “To raise awareness”; but by now all issues have been presented, discussed, vetted, debated, and filed.  There is no more useful awareness to be had.

So it all comes down social collectivity – an expression of concern for a common cause which unites thousands into a community of ideas – an identity community with markers, banners, logos, doctrines, and liturgies.  Belonging feels good, feels important, feels useful, and most importantly reflects one’s own goodness.

It is no wonder that the millions of people who have real, immediate, and often immediately soluble problems have little interest in the protests on the Mall.  As one critic implied, they are forced progressivism, elitist assumptions of righteousness and far from the practical, imperative demands of the community.

Demonstrations on the Mall come and go, the grounds are policed, re-turfed and –sodded for the next round of protests, social media are saturated with images and stories for a few days and then re-calibrated, return to normal while the protesters return home, to school, and to work.

A lot has been written on conspiracy theories and why so many people subscribe to them.  The Freudian school sees ego and superego conflicts ending in external resolution (aliens, Armageddon).  Social psychologists feel that the resort to unproven and improvable theories is a result of alienation, a lack of empowerment, and the loss of a sense of entitlement. Cognitive theorists suggest that those who believe in strange, improbable happenings simply have loose wiring in their hippocampus; and behaviorists predicate a loss of lack of reason on repeated illogical reinforcement.  

Whatever the reason, conspiracy theories add to the feeding frenzy of social causes.  There has to be a conspiracy of white, privileged men behind racism and oppression.   Capitalism has to be at the root of climate change.  Irrational, medieval, homophobia is hardwired and irremediable.   Conspiracy theorists are not just the wackos in their Idaho cabins, but Washington political activists.

Politicians have always known how to use America’s short attention span and fickle political commitment to their advantage.  Starting a small war has always been de rigeur for American presidents – so much so that a popular Hollywood movie, Wag the Dog, a satirical story of Oval Office shenanigans, was produced. 

In the film after being caught in a scandalous situation days before the election, the President does not seem to have much of a chance of being re-elected. One of his advisers contacts a top Hollywood producer in order to manufacture a war in Albania that the president can heroically end, all through mass media.  If not war, then some other invented crisis to divert the public’s attention – a very easy proposition in such a credulous, desperately cause-needy nation.

And so it goes from one fad to the next – hula hoops, frisbees, pet rocks, and global warming.  America is one great, continuing circus act with a new side show feature every month.  Punch and Judy, grand guignol, and operatic excess to the nines.  Not to be missed.

The False Reality Of Hard Fact–Why Fantasy Was So Appealing To The Senator

A lot has been made of fact recently.  Politicians are routinely called out for their distortions, fabrications, misstatements, and downright lies.  Why this is necessary when everyone knows that the stock-in-trade of politicians is duplicity and self-serving invention is always a surprise.  One recent Senator claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was actually in New Orleans with his octoroon lover – in a seedy hotel in the seediest ward of the city all to evade scrutiny and to live out his Faulknerian fantasy.  He was Thomas Sutpen, powerful landlord of a hundred square miles of rich bottom land cleared by a hundred wild Negroes brought from Haiti, sexually ambitious, and powerful.  Sutpen bedded a beautiful octoroon; and their son years later returned to Mississippi to exact his mother’s vengeance  on the man who left her.

The Senator at least had a good reason for his untruths.  Many other politicians simply want to cover their tracks, divert attention from their financial indiscretions, iffy investments, or unlawful hedging.  Not so the Senator who when in Washington was a model of rectitude and propriety.  He had been elected on moral principle and right behavior, and his constituents knew they could rely on him for the truth and for the facts. The Senator could simply not admit to his socially conservative base that he was not only having an affair, but one with a Haitian dark-eyed beauty whom he kept in luxury on Bayou Lafourche. 

The Senator was a married man and had been for over thirty years to a woman of means and social prominence.  She was the perfect complement to the Senator, as appropriately modest, temperate, and principled but with a certain patrician elegance that came from generations of prosperous, influential, cultured Virginians.  The Senator might not have deliberately gone on the hunt for the right political mate; and he certainly never admitted the possibility to himself or anyone else; but there she was in tailored suits, pearls, and impeccable skin, beautiful and stunning by his side on the campaign trail.

Over the years, however, the Senator did indeed admit that he had married the wrong woman.  As correct and proper as she was for political ends, she was an emotional cipher, a woman without sexual calling or interest.   Life with her had become irrevocably dull; and as much as tried to tamp down his sexual ego, he could not; and the first tryst with his mulatto beauty, long planned and awaited, became real.

The story of their meeting is one of marvelous fantasy.  It was no mirage that the Senator felt himself Thomas Sutpen’s doppelganger.  Every page of Absalom, Absalom resonated with particular relevance.  Sutpen was everything that the Senator was not – virile, confident, single-minded, and determined.  Sutpen had left rural West Virginia poverty behind and made his way south to seek fortune and reputation.  He was indomitable, commanding, and possessed of a particular, singular vision.  His sexual appetites were unchecked, and color was no bar.  Sutpen loved women, wanted them, and wanted their children.  The poor Senator’s life was flimsy and shameful by comparison.

In most people fantasy remains closeted, aired only on occasions; but for the Senator his imagined machismo a la Thomas Sutpen was real.  His behind-the-scenes arrangement of his mistress to be was no different than Sutpen’s must have been.  Beautiful high class octoroons in Sutpen’s day were desirable concubines who escaped the prejudice against former slaves or dark, black women from newly-liberated Haiti.  The Senator, in a deft hopscotch, kept his desires and his search a secret. 

The marvelous thing about fantasy is that once it is firmly in place as the reality, no flaws, imperfections, or things not exactly right could tarnish it; and so it was with Marguerite, as beautiful, sultry, and sensual as advertised, and so alluring and enticing that the Senator overlooked her Ninth Ward upbringing and cheap tastes.   To him she was as cultured and elegant as the highest toned, most sophisticated New Orleans consort of 1850.  He could take her to the finest restaurants, the opera, balls, and vernissages with pride.

Of course he did not take her anywhere for fear of discovery and had to do with thin towels and torn sheets at the La Doucette, room service champagne, foie gras, and étouffée.  However, it all was better than he had ever expected – more than he imagined, an idyll of magnificent proportions. What to others might have seemed a seamy, squalid affair, to the Senator it was a perfect Lawrentian sexual epiphany, a perfect match, and the final ridding of long frustrated dreams.

Politically speaking the Senator’s story had no good ending.  He was found out, trailed by paparazzi to La Doucette, called out for sexual impropriety, adultery, and barefaced lying and forced to resign.  His wife left him and already penurious because of his lavish attentions to his octoroon, he had to give her up. 

His world had come precipitously down and he a cropper, left with no employment, no wife, no mistress, and no prospects.  It had to end this way, and even he knew what he had been in for; but he never regretted one moment of his affair and his glorious, fantastic, mighty love for his New Orleans consort.

The Senator was not alone among men with obsessive fantasies.  In fact that breed is as common as spaniels; but few men ever act on their desires.  The Senator,although reduced to shame in the eyes of others, was an existential hero, a man who cared little for ordinariness and fact, who saw little value in received wisdom, and who followed his own beacon.  Life might be meaningless, but as Sartre admonished, “Do something with it!”.

I once knew a woman who told tall tales about her past – unbelievably embellished stories of impossible successes, love affairs, and acclaim.  Yet despite this intricately woven fabric of untruths, she was a delightful, intelligent, and competent woman.  She had enough observable success and recorded accomplishments to satisfy any suitor; but chose to create her own summits. As one fantastic story was overlaid on an even more implausible one, I became annoyed.  How could she not see how transparent her inventions were? And yet I was reluctant to call her out. 

She was the Sarah Bernhardt of the Carpathians, theatrical, operatic, and as talented at spinning melodrama as any daytime television actress.  Why interrupt those marvelous fanciful reveries?  They were as much a part of her as her radio stations, her investments, and her villa.  Without them she would be reduced to a simple, respectable no one. 

Fact and truth are sorely overrated; and fantasy, confabulation, and invention just as sorely undervalued.  Those who are impatient with fairy tales are life’s slugs.

The Importance Of Empire - Biden, Inclusivity, And The Weakness Of American Culture

Culture does matter, insisted  Lawrence Harrison one of the first outspoken advocates for considering culture as an important factor in economic development and geopolitical strength.  Those countries which have a strong, well-defined, universally respected ethnical core – like China - will prevail; while those which do not will flounder in search of a national identity, an ethos, a raison d’etre; and in so doing will lose traction to those who have always  had one. 

The "Confucian" countries (more accurately the countries strongly influenced by Chinese culture, which also embraces, in addition to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship) all share substantially in the universal culture of progress: education, achievement, work ethic, merit, and frugality are all highly valued in the East Asian societies. 

The United States, declared Harrison, is among those who flounder.  It has wandered far from the Enlightenment principles of the Founding Fathers enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It has long ceased to be the nation that Jefferson and Hamilton envisaged – one that embraced the enduring philosophical premises of England and incorporated them as part of the ethos of the new, optimistic, and adventurous republic.  On the contrary it has become a legalistic, procedural country obsessed with rights and liberties without the ethical and moral core to give them context.

A Chinese exchange student studied in the United States for a year in the mid-90s just as China was beginning to implement its most dramatic economic reforms.  At this time, before the economic revolution had taken hold, China was still a developing country as it had been for centuries.  As the West accelerated from the 19th to the 20th century and became an industrialized power, China lagged far behind.  “We have culture”, said the student. “Thousands of years, many powerful dynasties from Xia Dynasty 4000 years ago.  Evolved religion, Confucius, art, philosophy, culture.  Why are we so backward?”

The young man only had to wait a few years to see how this history and culture would provide the foundation for rapid economic development; for there was no doubt that China’s cultural, historic core would be the foundation on which practical, secular progress would be built.

A culture built around Confucian principles of respect for elders and tradition, wisdom, loyalty, discipline, and trustworthiness coalesced easily around newly-enunciated programs of national reform.  A culture which had millennia of ‘authoritarian’ Mandarin rule would not find the centralized programs of the Politburo intolerable, especially since the economic changes implemented promoted economic development.

Russia’s rapid return to geopolitical power and influence was similarly motivated by cultural nationalism – a desire, if only implied, to return to the reign of the Tsars and the power and glory of the Russian Empire.  

History was not simply a chronicle of past events, but a recording of sacred events.  Russia was never just a country defined by geographical borders and, like many in Europe, ruled by monarchy.  It was different, unique.  Its Empire was more lustrous than even that of Louis XIV.  Its art, music, literature, and philosophy were of a higher, more sophisticated order.  It was an Arctic kingdom, strong, resilient, and dominant because of the harshness and unforgiving nature of its land.  St. Petersburg was an imperial city more elegant, refined, and beautiful than Versailles.

Harrison has argued that not only does culture matter, but that it is organic, substantial, and innate.  Even those with only a vague recollection of the facts of Russian or Chinese history have over the centuries come to incorporate its ethos.  It cannot be forgotten.  

Two hundred-and-fifty years of American history is nothing compared to the thousands of years of China, Russia, and India; or the Turkish legacy of Genghis Khan and the Ottomans; or the lesser-known but equally dominant imperial history of Korea and Vietnam.  The reigns of these countries lasted for centuries, whereas the original cultural ethos of Jefferson was soon lost on the frontier and on Wall Street.  Principle soon gave way to procedure. Individualism, free enterprise, and entrepreneurialism – concepts without purpose except their own continuance – became the culture. 

Dodsworth, a novel by Sinclair Lewis tells the story of a good, principled, Middle American businessman and his socially ambitious, cultural ignorant wife and the tragedy that follows.  Lewis, critical of Fran Dodsworth’s petty pretentions, fanciful dalliances, and blindness to anything of substance or principle, sets much of the novel in Europe among the wealthy, aristocratic leisure class. He is critical only of the parvenu Fran and not the European culture to which she aspires.  

There is worth in the old aristocratic, Old World traditions, he writes – a sense of permanence or longevity – and without the aristocracy the cultural history of France, Italy, and England would be lost and forgotten. It matters little to the Count von Obersdorf, one of the aspiring suitors of Fran Dodsworth and her millions, that he does ‘nothing’, that he builds nothing, that he creates nothing.  His job has been inherited and is sacrosanct.  No matter how many elegant affairs he attends, or trips to the Dolomites or the Riviera he takes; no matter how much of his diminishing wealth he spends, he cannot be criticized.  He not only lives in Europe, he is Europe, the cultural brother of Charles de Gaulle who said, ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’ -  I am the embodiment of the new, democratic, free France.  I am France!

No wonder Fran Dodsworth is befuddled by Kurt Obersdorf’s apologia for European aristocratic values. She sees only titles, chateaux, worldliness, and sophistication, and he sees heritage, cultural responsibility, and historical nationalism. He says

The European, the aristocrat, feels that he is responsible to past generations to carry on the culture they have formed. He feels that graciousness, agreeable manners, loyalty to his own people, are more important than wealth; and he feels that to carry on his tradition, he must have knowledge – much knowledge…

That tradition helps keep us together, understanding each other, no matter how foolish we are and suicide with the Great Wars. However we may oppose it, we are all at heart pan-Europeans. We feel that the real continental Europe is the last refuge of individuality, leisure, privacy, quiet happiness. We think that good talk between intelligent friends in a café in Paris or Vienna or Warsaw is more pleasant and important than having septic tanks or electric dish-washing machines. ..But Europe, she believes that a Voltaire, a Beethoven, a Wagner, a Keats, a Leeuwenhoek, a Flaubert, give drama and meaning to life, and that they are worth preserving — they and the people who understand and admire them! Europe, the last refuge, in this Ford-ized world, of personal dignity.

While this all might be somewhat of an exaggeration, it is not far from the truth. European aristocrats do indeed feel an obligation to continue the storied tradition of their ancestors – to preserve, defend, and extend the greatness of European literature, art, and science; and to continue a tradition of elegance, manners, good taste, and sophistication.

Immigration and open borders have begun to change all that.  Those French who, like their Chinese and Russian counterparts who live their country’s imperial history, are becoming fewer and fewer.  France is no longer la fille ainee de l’Eglise – the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, the nation that defended Europe from the Saracen, Muslim invaders, the intellectual and cultural leader of Europe – but a polyglot nation struggling to find its new identity.  The search will be fruitless, for as can easily be seen in the United States, heterogeneity is the quickest route to a cultural swamp.

There is of course hope.  Donald Trump did his best to restore a sense of national pride and patriotism – superficial in and of itself, but the first step to an essential national unity. However if  ‘freedom, liberty, and opportunity’ are the only hallmarks of a geopolitically restored nation, the road to restoration will be a long one.  These principles have become nostrums and used in the political divide.  For the Left they mean increased valuation of the oppressed, the underprivileged, the marginalized, and the powerless.  For the Right they mean a return to an ungoverned laissez-faire society.

Jefferson explained that ‘the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ was not an end in itself but a means to a societal end.  American society could only survive if individualism and enterprise were means to create a better society.

Joe Biden is making matters hopelessly worse.  His focus on ‘inclusivity’, ‘diversity’, and the reconfiguring of American society into a chaotic, self-centered, self-righteous one based on personal identity is wrongheaded.  It not only increases a divisiveness which weakens the country, but guarantees the fragmentation of American society and culture.  Without an ethos, a cultural identity, a national purpose, then the country might well simply be a holding ground; a place to get a bed and a good meal.

Biden’s ignorance about the nature and salience of empire and imperialism is even more telling.  He dismisses the designs and intents of Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and the Ayatollahs simply as ‘anti-democratic’ political myopia.  Eventually they will see the light and come around to America’s way of thinking. 

Empire is dead only to Biden and his progressive supporters who insist on American exceptionalism despite all indications to the contrary.  Putin and his international colleagues see America’s self righteousness as a weakness.  Inclusivity, diversity, and identity politics can only further corrode American society to their advantage.

Biden is a lost president.  He has neither the intellectual acuity, the philosophical vision, the moral courage, or the political will to reformulate the challenge – to respect America’s growing cultural heterogeneity but not to step back from the country’s foundational moral values and historically correct principles of behavior and governance.