JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Charlie Rose repeated a March 2011 interview with David Brooks last night. Brooks was promoting his book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The book, as Brooks described it, is an allegory. Two fictional characters illustrate ideas. The ideas are drawn from psychological and sociological academic studies.

Some reviews indicate Brooks did not inhabit the characters, did not bring them to life, and the science might not be fully explored either. However, you don’t read such books for depth, but to get a feel for the landscape: a bright man trying to open a curtain so you can see what is being thought about in the realm of human behavior.

Brooks’ sensibility is quite appealing. He is someone who is “nice” without seeming weak. Brooks gives nice a good name. Brooks has underlying beliefs but sees no reason why arguments have to ensue. This is somewhat quixotic, as many people just want to argue, which often seems more the point for them, and so ideas are put aside no matter what someone like Brooks might wish. But to a remarkable degree, in the adversarial left-wing environment of the NYT, as it is now constituted, Brooks appears to be accepted and liked by the partisan community. Brooks has been damned as the conservative that liberals like. It isn’t really a condemnation at all, but rather a tribute to the man that he can force focus on ideas in the roiling emotional pit of public life.

I have to admit, and this is a bit unfair to Brooks as I have not read his book, but the ideas he discussed on Rose sound very like a New Age Benjamin Franklin redux. Work hard, care, come from or find a good environment, and you too can make it. Making it, prestige seeking, is one of the most off putting things about the NYT actually. The NYT and MSM in general have a conformist, career centered focus — rather than a values based or true achievement focus. Too often achievement is measured by salary (even, weird as it seems, inherited wealth), truly slimed by fame or popularity metrics, or simply defined as rising in the chosen bureaucracy — without questioning the cohort’s nature. I often have the same doubts about Brooks — a conventional, unquestioned deference to honorifics you could call it.

Brooks draws a larger circle than most commentators, seeing that the mysteries surrounding us can’t be easily formularized. Things are complicated, which is obvious, but in a meme loving, consensus culture, it is salutary to hear that things might not be so easy to understand or fix. Lopping off the ambiguities to fit the purity of idea doesn’t work in art, in life, or in serious thinking. At least Brooks gives complexity a try.

We only saw snippets but that was enough. In an orgy of self-indulgence Oprah has left the stage in an extended goodbye. A tribute to self.

Kimmel and Boyz II Men give their take:

Oprah did seem to make people feel good. Her shows early on were of the familiar stir-the-pot variety but of late she has been trying to be helpful, healthy and New Age wise. An American success story.

The world has not ended but I’m sorry to say Supernatural has for the season. The ratings were not good for the finale although it is one of the best shows on TV. Like all herd metrics ratings are meaningless indicators of the quality of a show.

Witty and cleverly plotted, the stories have real characters and surprising turns. The special effects on Supernatural were never distracting, but supportive of the story line.

On the other hand, Smallville has ended with a thud. It followed a strange bumpy arc as a show. Starting out poorly — the family setting never worked, nor did Lana Lang — it seemed to climb out of the doldrums and for awhile was fun to watch. The special effects were among the best integrated on any show on TV, or the movies for that matter.

But then in the last season it suffered character bloat; inevitably the story line got lost in the ever enlarging cast. It was a poorly cast show. Erica Durance, Michael Rosenbaum and Justin “Green Arrow” Hartley probably the best of the the group. Not sorry Smallville is gone. (It was always amusing to see “Crazy” Joe Davola’s name in the credit crawl.)

In yet another proof that Larry David is prescient, the recent misbehavior by Atlanta’s Roger McDowell has its predicate in a Seinfeld episode just replayed today.

The two Keith Hernandez episodes had as one of the story lines a satire of the Warren Commission’s report. On Seinfeld, Kramer and Newman accused Hernandez of spitting on them. But Hernandez implies in the second episode that it was Roger McDowell who was to blame because he had been arguing with Kramer and Newman as they heckled him through the game.

In the apology he offered this week, McDowell, 50, said he was provoked by heckling fans. Wren said the Braves were interviewing witnesses.

Foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, a frequent guest on PBS NewsHour, and left-leaning scholar, has written the most devastating piece about Obama since his election.

This is all familiar territory, obfuscated currently by ridiculous press about outlier birthers and tea party spectacle and publicity hounds like Trump and royal weddings — the press never wanted to cover Obama as an individual — they hated the bumbling Republicans too much:

The President looks like a man who is ridden by events; at just the moment when the nation craves a strong leader, the President looks weak, dodgy, uncertain.  The contrast with the inflated hopes that an untested and inexperienced Senator Obama did so much to build up is crippling.  Obama has fallen so far precisely because he and his supporters so hugely oversold him.…

We are starting to get to know this President a little better…He is a man of half measures, a man who spends so much money hedging his bets that he loses even when he wins.

Obama’s lack of leadership skills …

Here is the paradox we face:  The President is a consensus-seeker whose decision making style rewards polarization and a conciliator who loses friends without winning over enemies.

The President’s problem is not, I think, that he seeks compromise.  It is that the type of compromise he chooses is so ineffective.  Splitting the difference is not leadership; leadership is looking at the positions of two sides and finding creative new directions that give something to all sides — but move the ball down the field.

Obama’s lack of experience…

Another problem is experience, or rather the lack of it.  …he came to the White House with next to no experience at running bureaucracies or leading legislative coalitions.  He lacks Lyndon Johnson’s sure sense of what Congress will or won’t do (not to mention Johnson’s legendary ability to build support for his agenda), and he lacks the international seasoning of a George H. W. Bush or Richard Nixon. This kind of experience is what is necessary both at home and abroad to understand the agendas and instincts of various parties and to figure out innovative, forward-looking ideas that can work around entrenched positions and make genuine progress. 

Now this would be surprising if it were surprising. But it was all laid out, from the outset. All doubts were subsumed under charges of racism. Obama thinks he is a glorious amalgam of Lincoln and FDR; when he speaks he leans his head back and jabs his finger, a simulacrum of JFK. A synthesized, synthetic president.

And the media will act as though it is purely Obama’s fault…hey, Obama just went with the flow.

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.

Well I was about to stop my regular checking of Steve Martin’s tweets, but then Steve put out a heartfelt appeal for an opening line for a “new scurrilous stand up” act.

Steve came up with,

Hello, muckel fucles. I see a lot Scurvy Bar Nuns here tonight. Sweet Haile Selassie, barn f’narkin, Milk-a-Whats. Kiss my sassafras.

Now this is good, in the sense of good, but I suggest,

Wellcum, my lively anacondas. Serve your muster with luffin and please stop muckin’ with my pecka-dillos if you want my so-sweet san souci!

It’s, it’s…nice. I think it is the exclamation mark that resolves to the purity that is Steve.

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.

We all have a love/hate relationship with media venues. They have some content we want, but there is something about the venue itself that puts you off.

The NYT has announced a subscription model that is already said to be a failed paradigm. Too complicated a fee structure; too expensive.

…The New York Times pricing seems designed not to get people to subscribe digitally, but rather to discourage existing subscribers from cancelling their print subscriptions

If you feel great affection for the NYT (anybody?), then it makes sense. But for many, like myself, the NYT is an amazingly comprehensive and interesting content provider, even with the ‘tude and bias, but it hasn’t won enough credibility to subscribe.

You know what is going to happen. The NYT has announced it is going to allow NYT links in blog posts free entry. So some bloggers will just list (aggregate) the main articles of the day (depending on their predisposition) and readers will get free entry.

Too bad about the Times really. Some very bright and able people there. Drowned in poor leadership. It looked like Bill Keller had righted the ship after Howell Raines disastrously projected Pinch Sulzberger’s predilections, making it an adversarial organ of the Left, but when that failed, Sulzberger put old-timer Keller in charge. Keller, company man, seemed a moderating voice. The NYT has drifted since then. An example: Keller put a very young and inexperienced Obama-fan reporter to cover Obama during the election. It was an embarrassment for a newspaper that had the affectation of being a journal of record.

As Keller said about Fox: anyone who thinks the NYT is “fair and balanced” has to be deeply cynical.

A funny Jimmy Fallon presents Sheen as fragrance salesman:

Although Charlie Sheen appears certifiable, my assumption was that Chuck Lorre, the accomplished TV producer, was playing dad to Charlie’s Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I did not know what Sheen meant when he said that his borderline anti-Semitic slurs were “from Vanity Cards.” Apparently people freeze frame the closing credits where these short pieces written by Lorre are recorded for history.

Here is one:

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #334

I understand that I’m under a lot of pressure to respond to certain statements made about me recently. The following are my uncensored thoughts. I hope this will put an end to any further speculation.

I believe that consciousness creates the illusion of individuation, the false feeling of being separate. In other words, I am aware, ergo I am alone. I further believe that this existential misunderstanding is the prime motivating force for the neurotic compulsion to blot out consciousness. This explains the paradox of our culture, which celebrates the ego while simultaneously promoting its evisceration with drugs and alcohol. It also clarifies our deep-seated fear of monolithic, one-minded systems like communism, religious fundamentalism, zombies and invaders from Mars. Each one is a dark echo of an oceanic state of unifying transcendence from which consciousness must, by nature, flee. The Fall from Grace is, in fact, a Sprint from Grace. Or perhaps more accurately, “Screw Grace, I am so outta here!”

It turns out that Chuck himself has a thought process that meanders. Of course, Lorre isn’t issuing slurs and the short piece has some (ironic) interest. Sheen is pure spectacle.

Paddy Chayefsky was prescient when he wrote Network. It is a story that comes to mind again and again as we witness the passing public horror show. Howard Beale lives and his name is Charlie Sheen…

The saga of Charlie Sheen continued to generate hit television ratings Tuesday night, as a special edition of the ABC news program “20/20” attracted more than double the number of viewers that the network typically draws on that night.…Mr. Sheen has now helped numerous shows elevate their ratings in the last week…

The article goes on to show the spectacular outcome in ratings for the network of a public mental breakdown.

Beale was depressed about sagging ratings but Sheen is manic with grandiosity at his sensational success and affronted there is any consequence to his words. Sheen is right about his telling the truth: about who he is and what he thinks. With decorous behavior a distant memory — “I used to be a pleaser” — Sheen feels he can let it rip and still win. And he knows media culture will enable it; Sheen understands.

Pop culture used to have a fan base and celebrities. Those cohorts have merged. The cult of celebrity has infected the culture. It vitiates politics and business and the arts. It finally infiltrated the quotidian. Everyone is a star with fans, er, followers, on social networking sites. Is it a democratization of ego focus, or is it just a meaningless spectacle, Alfie?