JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

This fascinating dialog between a psychologist, Carlo Strenger, and Robert Wright, has a stimulating and familiar ring. It is a discussion, like many, both intelligent and ultimately unsatisfying. Maybe all discourse threatens to fall off the cliff as logical discussion can easily become display behavior… but they deserve credit for giving it an honorable try.

Strenger wrote a book called The Fear of Insignificance. He feels the prevalence of ranking and the worldwide media, which he calls the “global entertainment system,” make us acutely aware of our smallness in the scheme of things. We don’t have status and it is shoved in our face. He points out that popularity is valued over achievement. That being known is a value in itself. Not achievement, but simply awareness of self by others.

He expands this to the tribal groups that make up the world, from nations to religious affinity groups, and feels this applies here as well. He feels ultimately it is a fear of death that drives all this. Something of a let down in analysis begins with that obvious predicate of all philosophy.

He feels, and this is where the falloff occurs abruptly, that the answer is a global sense of tribe and a universalist philosophy.

I hope all that is fair to Strenger’s well meaning ideas. But they simply don’t resonate. We will always be tribal creatures, are so genetically predisposed, and the issue is really not individual universalist affinity, but rather that each tribe be open and compassionate to other tribes. You really would not want to live in a world that had a mumbling generalist culture. The heritage of people matters. But that does not have to be exclusive. So this issue is not in individual transformation, but in group self-concept — allowing for an inquisitive inclusiveness rather than defensive isolation. So the focus should be on education of the insulated tribes— many societies just don’t tell the truth to their people.

Wright has an Israel problem that always obtrudes. He identifies with “demands” made by the enemies of Israel, thinking it is logic driving their behavior. And Wright thinks there is some logical solution: do what they want. He feels their arguments are the sole arguments to be acted upon. This is reminiscent of celebrities lolling in Beverly Hills proffering advice to the unwashed; the privileged of course don’t have to deal with the consequences of their advice — they are well away from jeopardy or daily contact with the issues.

The Huffington Post is being sued by bloggers,

bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation…

The dramatic rhetoric aside, this is an interesting issue. Like Juan Williams who learned what liberal now means as taught him by NPR: join the Borg collective or be expelled from the collective with malice.

These bloggers have learned that the egalitarian affectations of folks like Huffington is really a cover story: Huffington is simply an oligarch. She sees others as useful, as a narcissist sees others as tools to their purpose. Those like her want to tell the unwashed, clinging to their guns and religion, what is right and then impose it through shame (you are a bigot if you do not agree) or ostracism via cackling snarkiness.

So Huffington, who did not deign to pay for content as she raked in money, and did not share the $315 million profit (except with her business partners) when she sold to AOL, who exploited celebrity dim wittedness to her benefit, is now making it clear to 9000 bloggers that she disdains her own work gang — as she always had. Privately she thought, “I wouldn’t work for nothing.”

There are so few moderates, so few independents it seems; maybe they just aren’t focused on by the media because there is less heat to attract an audience, and the media knows, you make more money with heat than light.

Nir Rosen, a media figure who wanted to be really famous got his wish after cackling dismissively at the horrifying sexual assault of reporter Lara Logan in Egypt. (Logan is not only a reporter with a job, she is in the class of Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns — a straight shooter.)

Rosen has been trying to gain attention through provocation for a long time. Like many of the extreme voices in the public debates, he projects his emotional problems into his politics; he hopes to be perceived as a freedom fighter; not as the disturbed and cynically ambitious individual he is.

Rosen, no surprise, has been embraced by the media. I remember seeing him on PBS Newshour, with the familiar look of the provocateur, purring with delight at the attention and sanctification provided by PBS. He seemed disturbed then actually. Noticeably so.

At the Atlantic:

[Nir Rosen] is sympathetic to the Taliban; he thinks al Qaeda poses no threat to America; he wishes Americans would “get over” 9/11; and he thinks Israel is an “abomination” that should be destroyed. … In reading this treatise on Israel and its sins, it becomes clear that Rosen …feels the sort of hate for Israel and Judaism that one associates with the hardest core of Hamas.

Rosen is transparent: he wants attention. He sees stirring the pot as useful. It had worked for him before:

He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, Boston Review, Time, Mother Jones, and World Policy Journal.

And the characteristic demeanor of the narcissistic careerist — lazy and dissociated…

“I don’t have an explanation. I was a jerk,” Rosen told Cooper, who also was attacked while covering the recent protests in Egypt. (One of Rosen’s tweets suggested that Logan was trying to “outdo” Cooper.)

At WaPo:

To review: He made a joke of a brutal beating and sexual assault; he suggested that perhaps she concocted the sexual attack; he called her a warmonger; he said it would have been funny if Anderson Cooper had been attacked, too.

Cooper’s cutting response:

“You kind of sound like a bitter, jealous reporter angry at some other reporter who is more well known,” Cooper said.

Well, now you are famous Nir. Enjoy.

Mel Gibson had to get drunk to tell us who he really was; Rosen just needs to tweet to betray his true feelings.

Obama’s difficult task is to travel to the center without overturning the cart held aloft by his supporters. He seemed to get it in his Tucson speech, pulling back from the opportunism of the left in ascribing the act of a lunatic to political rhetoric on the right. A morally despicable assertion, instantiating the very virulence that was supposedly being condemned. Hypocrisy squared.

Obama cast aside those easy arguments, at least for now. If he can adhere to his assertions, use whatever skills he has accumulated the last two years, and see himself as a leader rather than allocator, he will benefit America enormously.

Obama noted, expectedly but still most welcome, the importance of education and innovation. His telling point, that teachers must be respected for there to be meaningful education, was probably a high point. A culture of entitled narcissists isn’t going to cut it. His rousing assertion of the freedom of America as opposed to the constipated command economies of other nations was especially welcome.

Internationally, instead of wanting to “talk to” the worst actors, as he had early on bloviated in a grandiose confidence in his ability to charm and convince, Jimmy Carter like, Obama emphasized the competitive capitalism that drives the world now. A grounded stance — rejecting the bad actors and affirming the future possibilities. The world is not a member of cult Obama he learned and noted after an Asian visit. Those were anti-American cheers he was hearing in foreign climes.

The speech was watery but, in a contradiction, filled with a desire to inspire. It was good to watch him in that body of politicos. It was even more interesting before it began and the cocktail party of Congress intermingled. Human interaction, even when formalized, is always a fascination. An exceptional system is the American system — Obama is correct.

Football playoffs end with players of the opposing teams greeting and hugging. Baseball playoffs end with one team celebrating in the center of the field while the losing team sits, staring petulantly in their dugout. We need some football mind now.

The real problem with herd mind is there is no responsibility. No responsibility, no shame, no accountability. Read the Comments sections of online discussion sites and you can see the struggle both to expel the impure (being wrong) and to affirm purity. In those venues this is expressed as an attempt to look smart; or at least smarter.

Lost like the rutting creatures in the street in Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, ideologues are part of a frenzy group. That is what ideologues seek — belonging. In the modern world, so alienating with its virtual friendships, it is understandable. Hollow belonging is better than no belonging.

Ideologues are conformists. They are called partisans in the media, but they are conformists. Ideologues do have distinct beliefs, but they are so mangled by their need to affirm their affinity group they squander their common sense along the way.

Those who seek the herd with such alacrity have numerous examples of the ostracism that comes with not uttering the (politically) correct meme, so they trade their individuality for their belonging. On the left you are a bigot if you don’t agree. On the right you are a socialist (it used to be a commie).

Herd mind gives us clichés, memes, TV nightly news, and the deadness of media culture. The throb of the personal, with its individuality and surprises was easy to discard in the public square — it is uncomfortable to adjust to ambiguities or try and expand your thinking.

Where can you run when they are all rutting in the streets?

This dialog between Robert Wright and Catherine Fitzpatrick has more interest than most coverage on this hot topic. Fitzpatrick is very bright; her parrying with Wright brings out her clarity and the moral underpinnings of her thinking. She is convincing in her argument that WikiLeaks is a dangerous model for geeks and some absolutist ideologues of “freedom” to affirm.

Fitzpatrick says:

… WikiLeaks, … not only involves anonymous people we can’t see …but the leadership of their meglomaniac anarchist leader Assange whose worldviews aren’t about conscience but about anarchy and destructiveness in radical birthing of some new transcendent state. …Julian Assange wants to overthrow the state and put into power a global stateless movement with himself and other conspirators in power…
…
There is this frightful American exceptionalism in reverse that the left suffers from — implying that if only the U.S. becomes good, stops “lying about two wars,” and withdraws from the fighting of insurgents, that everything will go well. I disagree. I think a “domino theory” in Central Asia, the resurgence of Russia and then its conflict with China, and the loss of Israel in the Middle East to the triumphalism of Palestinians and their Arab backers are all…awful things that really spell a frightening New World Order that isn’t free — and those would be the consequences.

The hate for America which was taken up by American academics in the sixties from European models has morphed into a grotesque. Moral compass lost, the formula is, as Assange has stated, to attack America. Assange is an enemy of America. He is an enabler of the thugs. This is what his allies have to assess if they are to offer their support — that they understand what they are supporting. Do journalists and the honorable left really consider Assange a colleague?

Fitzpatrick admires the late French thinker Guy Debord of whom she says, “…although I don’t at all like his politics or methods, … [but] he’s a brilliant and original thinker, not a derivative…”

Brilliant and original thinker, not a derivative — an excellent description of Fitzpatrick as well.

Here is Richard Holbrooke in 2008 talking about genocide:

Holbrooke spoke with disgust at the idea that “nothing could be done”. His disdain for Columbia’s invitation to Ahmadinejad. He references Darfur and Iran and Bosnia as venues that need intervention. He expresses how appalled he was at George HW Bush’s minion Lawrence Eagleburger who said about Bosnia: “let them kill each other until they get tired”.

Bad guys tell you who they are. All you have to do is listen, take it seriously and act accordingly; not throw up your hands and say it is what it is.

The Washington Post describes the fascinating battle of very rich partisans. The surface battle is between Media Matters and Fox. But the real battle is…

…between rival billionaires. In one corner: Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive and principal shareholder of News Corp., Fox’s parent company. In the other: George Soros, the wildly successful investor whose philanthropic organization, the Open Society Institute, has funded many of the organizations that Fox’s personalities like to attack, including Media Matters.

It is easier to understand the motives of Murdoch, who benefits from a conservative advocacy. Although that might imply that Soros is pristine in his motives, this would be a hasty and unlikely conclusion; Soros’ slant is more a curiosity than Murdoch’s advocacy.

The one disturbing issue, given the left wing bias in the press: will Soros ever get serious as opposed to partisan scrutiny? He seems to have bought himself immunity from a beholden, lost-in-space press. As the revenue streams have crumbled, the press has self-destructed into one segment of its enterprise that generates revenue: celebrity news. Now the MSM has adopted, in the way it covers politics, the defaults of personality based celebrity news. That is how Obama got elected. That, and the help provided by the bungling Republicans.

For the country to become less partisan the money which drives political campaigns has to be capped. I don’t know what you can do about very rich advocates who can have such an enormous effect on the debate. Should these two individuals be driving the debate?

The public dump of documents by Wikileaks was characterized as “an attack on the international community” by Clinton.

Australian Julian Assange says he is “deeply satisfied” at stirring the pot. Look at the attention this son of a theatrical family is getting. That is not how he characterized his delight it is just what he meant. You don’t need to be Tim Roth’s histrionic character in “Lie To Me”, an insight superman, to see in Assange’s face the arrogant and smug expression of the toxic provocateur.

Although Julian Assange thinks he is a truth teller he is really the town gossip, leaking his poisons into the town well as he celebrates his cluelessness — which he mistakes for bravery. The expected trivial sarcasm in diplomatic back channel communications, leaked in thousands and thousands of pages by Assange The (self-described) Editor, adds up to what it is, junk that people say to one another privately. Shocker.

An interesting side-note: While Jew-haters have used Israel as a proxy, suggesting manipulation by a foreign government in American policy (“they have too much power” slander), these leaks make it clear Israel is not in the lead in its horror at the thug-run regime in Iran — even more keenly than Israel, it is leaders in the Arab world who see Iran as run by a Hitler.

An article in the NYT describes a controversy over giving an honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard. Godard walks, talks and sounds anti-Semitic but the Oscar committee is debating if his work should be honored nevertheless. The NYT says,

…a debate that has raged around artists as august as the poet Ezra Pound and as popular as the actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson: Is the work somehow tainted by the attitudes of the man?

Ezra Pound, mentally ill and a poet, has no relation to dim entertainment guy Mel Gibson with his Holocaust denying daddy.

The best approach would be to parse the work itself. Years ago Susan Sontag wrote a NYRB review of a book of photographs by Leni Riefenstahl which incorporated, Sontag felt, Riefenstahl’s aesthetic — a grim fascist “taste” that was reflected in all Riefenstahl’s work. Leni was a fascist, through and through Sontag cogently asserted.

Degas, Cézanne, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf … a slew of artists have been tainted by endemic European anti-Semitism. Except in the case of Shakespeare’s Shylock, the work of those artists doesn’t present their bigotry. People come out of a time and we make allowances for the currents in which they swim. Also, and most significantly, of their reaction to the toxic fumes wafting over them. How much has their spirit been infiltrated by the hate of their contemporaries? Does the work itself reflect the mental illness that is bigotry or does such malevolence live only in the quotidian life of the creator?

The secondary issue is a tough one in contemporary society: the issue of morality and fairness. Sometimes they are not the same thing. It might be fair to give an award to an influential filmmaker, but would it be right? Isn’t the work tainted? Again, you have to take this on a case by case basis.

In the case of Godard no award should be given. Ironically, Godard could care less, so this discussion in Hollywood is more — as usual — about Hollywood’s self-image than about the real issue of bigots who make films.

Political correctness at one time had a logic. People would casually express the most deplorable stereotypes. But political correctness doesn’t seem to have diminished prejudice. For all the bullying inherent in political correctness — as recently expressed by the firing of Juan Williams by NPR — prejudices remain but are now unexpressed. If anything the divisions and prejudicial thinking have spread to ideology. The present split in the political landscape has been exacerbated by our No Red State No Blue State president.

The anger about aggressive political correctness — which is what the current implementation of airport screenings really is — is not framed as it should be as political correctness. People are afraid to say the obvious: that those screened should be the likely culprits.

Krauthammer says about airport screenings:

We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

The hypocrisy of these thought police is most abrasively devious in politics — identity politics can win you an election and is used cynically by those who most claim to be free of prejudice. There is a real confusion in America about doing good from the heart and doing good as display behavior: from the ego. Many who claim to be tolerant see anyone who doesn’t agree with them as impure — a sure sign good will is not the motivating force. Think of the disgust on the faces of the panelists who walked-off on The View during the O’Reilly segment.

The admirable aim of treating people well and fairly has been diminished by the people who most claim to advocate those ideals.