History Management and Franchise Protection

President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and self-serving where not simply false. 

Andrew Bacevich intelligently applies Niebuhr* to the Bush benightenment:

 Since the end of the Cold War, the management of history has emerged as the all but explicitly stated purpose of American statecraft. 

Much has been made of the allegedly Bible-driven subtext peering through Bush's melodramatic horseshit, e.g:

When our founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner of 'Freedom Now'--they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty.

It's important to be clear that in critique, Bush's reading of the Bible -- if indeed that's what he (viz his handlers) were doing -- gets filtered through someone else's reading of that reading, simultaneously triangulating with their own reading of the good book.

What sort of tugs at that reduction of Bush and his "base" to mere Christian barbarism is that there may be another sort of contest built in that should not be ignored.

For example, in The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin talks about how the Chinese, who early on were so advanced in optics, glassmaking, camera obscura boxes etc. were dismal in astronomy.

It seems astronomy was sort of the stem cell technology of the age. A 17th century visitor, Father Matteo Ricci, noted that the Chinese had "seen" more stars than their semblables in the West, but had failed to make any scientific sense out of them. Ricci wrote in 1605: 

...the Chinese astronomers take no pains whatever so reduce the phenomena of celestial bodies to the discipline of mathematics. . . .  they center their whole attention on that phase of astronomy which our scientists term astrology, which may be accounted for by the fact that they believe that everything happening on this terrestrial globe of ours depends upon the stars. . . . The founder of the family which at present regulates the study of astrology prohibited anyone from indulging in the study of this science unless he were chosen for it by hereditary right. The prohibition was founded upon fear, lest he who should acquire a knowledge of the stars might become capable of disrupting the order of the empire and seek and opportunity to do so.

Surely the family patriarch was also concerned to protect his franchise. Local intellectual property and monopoly rights management are always present in these thickets. My point simply is that the underlying issue really was more complex than the bare opposition of supernatural authority to natural intellect -- these hotbutton matters were in a knot whose threads included tradition, mafia power, trust, underlying cultural disposition, protection racketeering and realpolitick concerns that the sacred tools of history management (e.g., the calendar) be protected from interlopers. This much seems relevant to what's at stake in the cultural divide from which Bush and now Palin have derived both energetic support and potent opposition. 

*h/t to Informant

Palin can have her moose and eat it too and that's ok with me

I like to think I'm a pretty tolerant guy. If it should turn out, for example, that Ms. Sarah Palin not only enjoys blowing moose to smithereens, but in fact also enjoys blowing moose tout court, I would not find anything necessarily disqualifying therein to her right to hold the most powerful political office on earth.

So long, that is, as she kept her moose proclivities from obtruding upon high level meetings with the army chiefs of staff etc.

What seems like it ought to be disqualifying, though, is when the leader of an ostensibly secular state fails to respect the distinction between her private beliefs regarding the divine and its place in human affairs on the one hand, and the duty to fulfill the obligations of her public office as inscribed in the Constitution on the other.

It would seem part and parcel of deep religious faith -- of the very nature of an "act of faith" -- that such a profound commitment is accompanied by an awareness that the "grounds" of the belief posture derive substantially and inelastically from modalities that fall outside the realm of science, of empirical evidence, of logic, and of shareable proof.

To "have faith" then is to have something that you fully understand might not be available to others, indeed to many others, who, if you happen to be a politician, may participate in all sorts of ways in the deliberations, decisions and effects flowing from those decisions that you make in your public capacity.

To speak to citizens of a state with the grandiose presupposition that they either already share your beliefs or ought to share them -- because your beliefs stem from an authoritative source that they ought to know, even though nowhere in the foundational language of the state does it require citizens to have that ethical obligation relationship with a/the divinity (in Palin's case, a divinity that probably would have frightened the founding fathers into pledging their most fervid allegiances back to King George) -- is to speak as an imbecile. That the USian media allow political leaders the latitude to speechifyingly link their Godly inspirations to earthly business is a pretty clear sign of a social and political discourse at the level of the diapered inane.

I'd welcome hearing of other ways of looking at the relationship of sacred belief to secular authority. Because right now, it seems to me the once in-vogue tradition -- the background radiation that has long alleged that Reason is what provides secular rulers with the proper relationship to those whom they rule -- is fading fast. It's paler than a medieval French tapestry left out to dry for eight or nine centuries. It's paler than McCain's arse in the moonlight. It's bloody unencarnadined. 

 

What matters for Sven, the anti-miscellaneous man

I'm talking about print reviewing here. For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet. To have a sense of where we stand, and to hold not just a number of ideas in common, but also some shared way of presenting those ideas, we continue to need, among many others, The New York Times, the Globe, the Tribune, the LA Times, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. -- Sven Birkerts via wood s lot

Birkerts' four-panel dis-ease with blogs (zero links, two vaguely noodled examples) culminates in a call for a return to print, to the stable, the vertical, the non-miscellaneous: to corporate media-controlled newspapers. Blogs are too snaky, too id-dy, too ephemeral. His is a passion for the solid, for some sturdy, super-egoey bit of ground to stand on. He freely grants that the Arnoldian ideal was a chimaera, except possibly "in Ivy enclaves and a few nodal centers in post-war New York," but dismisses the possibility that conversations happening now transglobally among literate folks can produce value.

The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of "post" and "update," the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of "I've been thinking . . ." approach. At some level it's the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability.

Here's what's odd: The for-want-of-a-better-word seeming confusion of "mattering" with the materiality of the medium. What matters for Sven is not the words, but the matter of them. If the cultural conversation is not in print (ideally in newsprint in a major USian city), it is immediately suspect. At no point does Sven take up any conversation, any discourse, any attempt to produce meaning on a blog. Yet he appears comfortable dismissing the entire phenomenon with a suspiciously self-deprecating wag of his graying locks:

Experiencing this, I become the gradually graying reviewer again. I can't help it. I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises. My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian "polymorphous perverse," that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself -- what we have been calling "culture" at least since the Enlightenment -- is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.

Here Birkerts joins that other master anti-miscelleneator, Andrew Keen, in calling for the de-emergence of voices that happen not to consist of the right stuff. (Calling it "print" is somewhat misleading, since blogs are mostly written, therefore at least emulate print.) Keen, who poses quite self-consciously in his blog as the anti-matter of David Weinberger:

Could Weinberger exist without me? Could I exist with him? Is this a publisher's plot or just the public effluence of a bad marriage?

Effluence smeffluence. Messers Keen and Birkerts, Arnoldian upholders of each other, ought to know that if they wish to distinguish what is the matter, and they discover that it is, in fact, the matter, then deviations from the material rules cannot be tolerated. Mr. Keen, who says "I'm currently reading everything about authority that I can get my hands on" ought to know that after the joys of dead trees and ink, nothing is more basic to the shared way of presenting...ideas in print than the ordering principles of grammar. Behold, then his handling of the apostrophe, and weep:


O tempura, o boar's head. The Apostrophe Protection Society has been advised.

See also this on one of the two blogs Sven noodles.

Update: Clay Shirky takes issue with Sven almost as an aside to a commentary on Nick Carr's criticism of Everything is Miscellaneous:

Birkerts frames the changing landscape not as a personal annoyance but as A Threat To Culture Itself. As he puts it “…what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.”

This is silly. The constraints of print were not a product of “emergent maturity.” They were accidents of physical production.