WHO WILL STOP THIS SENSELESS SLAUGHTER?:

Woman in a Red Raincoat (Clellan Coe, July 10, 2024, American Scholar)

In William Trevor’s story “A Meeting in Middle Age,” such a reversal almost happens. The story is about two strangers, a woman and a man. She is an unhappy wife wanting a divorce, which in mid-20th century Ireland meant supplying evidence of adultery. He is a lonely bachelor who, for a fee, agrees to play the part of the co-respondent by spending the night with her in a hotel room. As planned, they meet up on a train, then spend the evening visibly together, first in the hotel bar and then in the grill-room, before retiring to the room for the night. She, Mrs. da Tanka, is the more worldly one. “You must not feel embarrassment,” she tells him early on. “We are beyond the age of giving in to awkwardness in a situation. You surely agree?” Mr. Mileson doesn’t know how he feels.

During the evening, someone makes a wrong comment, someone is impatient, someone is rude, and, little by little, anger builds, bickering erupts, and personal remarks are made by these two strangers. They insult each other. Through the night it continues. Facing each other the next day in an empty carriage of the train, it goes on. Mrs. da Tanka taunts him with his solitary life. “When you die, Mr. Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs. da Tanka.”

Mr. Mileson, who has tried on other occasions to imagine his funeral, is taken off guard and answers. “Cow-parsley, I suppose.”

“Cow-parsley?” she echoes. She is surprised. She remembers cow-parsley from her happy childhood days. She remembers sitting in the sun amid bunches of it. “Why did you say cow-parsley?” she asks him, twice. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t answer. She tries to say something, but after the night they have passed, she can find no words that fit. She looks at him, imagining a different outcome to their meeting. She pictures them strolling out of the hotel, arm-in-arm, discussing and agreeing which direction to turn. On the train, he senses something and wants to speak, but his suspicion of her is too strong, and the words die on his lips. The two go on in silence. They leave the train together at their stop, then separate. The love affair that might have developed never gets a start, both people having joined in to ruin a chance.

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES:

Who Is an American?: Hint: It should not be about ancestry. (FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, JUL 26, 2024, Persuasion)

In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of principles … but a homeland.” He went on to illustrate this by referring to his family’s cemetery where he hoped seven generations would be buried in a plot in eastern Kentucky. He said the country welcomed newcomers like his wife’s family from India, but “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”

Taken at face value, this should not be particularly controversial. American identity has always been based on ideas like liberty and equality, making it what is sometimes labeled a “creedal nation.” But it also is a nation of shared memory and experience. And it is doubtless true that immigrants to the United States need to accept certain basic conditions for being an American, as required by their taking the oath of naturalization during the citizenship ceremony.

The real question is what Vance means by the phrase “on our terms” as a condition for Americanness. I would have thought that “our terms” meant precisely those ideas that constitute the American creed: loyalty to the Constitution and to the rule of law, and acceptance of the words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But Vance seems to be making the point that in addition to these ideas, ancestry is somehow also critical to Americanness. That quality is conferred by your progenitors, and is not simply a matter of your individual choice.

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

Philosophical Film: Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (Robert Pippin, 2010, New Literary Theory) [PDF]

[T]here is wide agreement that there were many stylistic conventions common to the new treatment of crime dramas prominent in the 1940s: grim urban settings, often very cramped interiors, predominantly night time scenes, and so-called “low key” lighting and unusual camera angles. But there were also important thematic elements in common. Two are especially interesting. First, noirs were almost always about crime, usually murder, often cold-blooded, well-thought-out murder. Even more surprisingly, the larger social context for such deeds, the historical American world in which they take place, was itself just as bleak, amoral, and ugly as the individual deeds and the characters themselves. Secondly, and perhaps most distinctively, many films challenged, in sometimes startling ways, many of our most familiar assumptions about psychological explanation. In ways that seemed both mysterious and credible, characters who had been righteous, stable, and paragons of responsibility all their adult lives were seamlessly and quite believably transformed in a few seconds into reckless, dangerous, and even murderous types, all suggesting that anyone, in the right (or wrong) circumstances, was capable of almost anything, and that one’s own sincere avowals of basic principles could be ludicrously self-deceived.

That’s pretty nearly our most familiar assumption, illustrated from The Fall of Man to Cain and Abel and onwards. And, as in the case of Adam and Eve, it’s nearly always a case of woman tempting man into sin. Meanwhile, thanks to the film code, the choice of evil always ends in self-destruction. This is all a reflection of how quintessentially American noir is.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

How Culture Got Stupid: ‘Despite the strange takeover of culture by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go.’ Kat Rosenfield joins The Free Press. (Kat Rosenfield, July 13, 2024, Free Press)

Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.

In the early 2010s, Tumblr gave birth to an accusatory and highly influential blog titled Your Fave Is Problematic, which studiously cataloged the offenses that artists, authors, and celebrities had committed against social justice. A hallmark of YFIP was its utter collapse of the distinction between art and artist: one representative post from 2013, about YA author John Green, lists allegedly offensive comments made by Green next to quotes uttered by his fictional characters, as though they were one and the same.

Years later, in 2021, the author of YFIP revealed herself in the pages of The New York Times, admitting she was an angsty teenager when she started the blog, and had canceled people to feel better about herself. But by then, the notion that cultural criticism should be first and foremost an exercise in taking offense had taken gangrenous root—not just on social media but in the legacy press, propagated by a new generation of young, hungry, underpaid opinion writers who survived by making you hate-click.

The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:

All art was political, and always had been;

Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;

And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.

The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded one representative essay at the viral trend site Uproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”

It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television.

Cancel Culture being so reactionary it couldn’t help but provoke the counter-reaction. And since the counters so outnumbered the correct it wasn’t much of a fight.

THE LAST AMERICAN HEROES:

It’s Time to Give Moonshine Some Respect: It’s an American tradition and as worthy a liquid as any unaged spirit (CAROLINE EUBANKS, June 26, 2024, Inside Hook)

“We just don’t have a better word, so moonshine has come to fill that void, and it’s problematic because moonshine can also mean an illegally-made spirit,” Spoelman says. “Then that suggests a dangerous or poorly made spirit, perhaps to some ears.”

The legacy of moonshine also counteracts many of the stereotypes. “A good moonshiner would try to give his customer a good value,” Schumaker says. “If you sell somebody 180-proof moonshine, it’s really not moonshine, it’s almost vodka at that point. There’s a misconception that that’s the only thing that a moonshiner would sell.” Unfortunately, the majority of the recognizable brands on the market don’t create anything that could truly be identified as moonshine, instead offering neon-hued flavored drinks made from neutral grain spirits in mason jars.

Moonshine is actually a uniquely American product with roots back to the earliest days of the nation. The Scots-Irish settling in the mountainous east coast are primarily responsible for bringing their centuries-old distilling traditions stateside, using corn and water straight from the source to carefully craft flavor. Kings County sources corn from upstate New York, and Highlands gets its materials locally in southwest Virginia and Pennsylvania, allowing for the spirit to pick up the terroir.

“It’s very challenging to make a white spirit palatable, and that’s the job of the moonshine maker, whereas the whisky maker can fudge that piece of the process and sort of age out the imperfections over time,” Spoelman says.

So why doesn’t the industry appropriately recognize it? Moonshine typically falls under the category of “other American whiskies” in the awards, and very few have broken through to claim the medals like Troy and Sons in Asheville, North Carolina, which has twice been honored for its platinum whiskey.

Moonshines of this variety also rarely appear on cocktail menus outside of the territory where the spirit is traditionally distilled in Appalachia. But it has as much versatility as anything else you might have behind the bar.

“The cocktail opportunity of an unaged whiskey remains pretty unexplored, especially when you have tequila, silver tequila, white rum and various kinds of apple spirit ending up in cocktails,” Spoelman says. “I still think moonshine is maybe at the trough of its backlash, and it’s poised for a re-emergence as a more cultural mainstay once it’s better understood.”

One of my buddies is a moonshiner and I bring him any grains, sugars, fruit products we are getting rid of. Constantly amazed at the quality of the liquor he can turn them into. There’s even a reality show about them nowadays.

REBELLING AGAINST THE BEAUTIFUL REQUIRES EMBRACING THE UGLY:

Dune: The Perfect Deathwork: How the thought of Philip Rieff illuminates a modern epic. (William Batchelder, June 26, 2024, Modern Age)

To reengage fully with the dark myth at the heart of Dune, it is best to turn to the work of one of the most pessimistic of our contemporary social theorists.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) offers an effective theoretical framework for interpreting Dune as deathwork and dark myth. Rieff made his early reputation as an interpreter of Freud. At the heart of his later work was a historicist interpretation of Western civilization, which he divided into three “cultures.” The first culture was the culture of paganism; in all such polytheistic cultures the gods themselves emerged from a “metadivine,” a source of power prior to and greater than the gods themselves. This source of fathomless power above even the gods Rieff called the “primacy of possibility.” Charged with the “constant energy of menace,” the primacy of possibility can turn men monstrous or destroy them. First culture man understood the primacy of possibility through myth; his relationship to it was mediated by unfathomable, amoral, and relentless fate. To keep his distance from its menacing power, he observed taboos.

Rieff’s second culture is that of the Abrahamic faiths. There is no metadivine; nothing stands above the God of Israel. In place of the taboos walling off the primacy of possibility there are the “interdicts”: directly commanded thou-shalt-nots declared by the God who reveals Himself. Man’s relationship to this God, the final authority, is characterized not by mysterious fate but by faith. The second culture sinks the interdicts into each individual beginning in a preconscious foundational process that builds individual character.

The third culture is the culture of modernity. It rejects God and the interdicts. Rieff believed that, because there can be no culture without either tabooed prohibitions or the character-shaping interdicts, the third culture is an “anticulture.” This third culture was ushered in by an “officer class” of intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Weber, and of course Freud were the most important theorists of the officer class; Joyce, Duchamp, and Wallace Stevens its artists par excellence. Rieff observed that this officer class, while godless, feels itself perpetually “god-threatened.” These intellectuals are compelled to address themselves to the God of the second culture in endless artistic acts of defacement and mockery. Rieff called such works of art the “deathworks”: intellectual and artisticassaults on the old, now disestablished, second culture.

To Rieff, the closest this modernist officer class can come to the affirmative creation of culture is to create deathworks that negate the second culture of faith while also attempting an unbelieving return to the “primacy of possibility”—the source of power beyond even the gods themselves—that marked the first culture. Of course, a skeptical modern cannot approach the primacy of possibility as a first culture man did. Instead, third culture imaginations invoke the oceanic power of the primacy of possibility self-consciously, even ironically. To some moderns, this primacy of possibility returns as atheistic invocations of what Rieff called “the Nothing,” which serve as a kind of anti-creed best expressed in endless hostile parodies of the second culture. Rieff cites as an example Joyce’s mockery of the Old Testament and his sneering “Woid” (void) in place of the “Word.”

To fill the emptiness, other third culture imaginations have embraced, or even self-consciously invented, some supra-human power echoing the ancient primacy of possibility. Moderns have embraced everything from the Trotskyists’ “permanent revolution” to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Wallace Stevens, in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” demanded the angels keep silent while the poet creates a self-conscious pseudo-religious abstraction as a substitution for the Trinity: “It must be Abstract. It must Change. It must give Pleasure.”

Dune is a perfect third culture deathwork because it offers an eloquent address to the Nothing and a invokes a fictive primacy of possibility almost profound enough to approach again the slopes of myth.

The constant need to define themselves in opposition to God is a confession. Richard Dawkins recent admission to being a cultural Christian was particularly hilarious.

THOSE DISAPPOINTED BY gOD:

The God-Haunted World of ‘Chinatown’: A look back at the neo-noir classic on its 50th anniversary. (Hannah Long, June 22, 2024, The Dispatch)

Whereas the god of Genesis pronounces creation good in its inception, reflecting himself, Chinatown reverses this. Every authority is fundamentally compromised or selfish. Women are liars; men are boors; fathers abuse their daughters; the police lack honor; there is no appeal to heaven. Even the act of life-giving is poisoned by power.

The makers of Chinatown were not unique in their cynicism. In the 1960s and ‘70s, screenwriters were bent on subverting the studio system rules and tropes established by the last generation. But like every rebellious teen, those anti-mythmakers fit into their own tradition. There are as many films portraying the seedy underbelly of Hollywood as there are lauding its glittering promise. From Norman Maine in A Star is Born walking into the ocean to Norma Desmond madly gyrating into the camera in Sunset Boulevard, disillusion and impotence are deep parts of the California myth. While Chinatown distills the trope with such clarity and feeling that it has become the platonic anti-ideal, it doesn’t create a new thing.

In fact, chucking the Christian myth actually means restoring a far more conservative vision, the “restoration of order”—but an ancient order. In Chinatown, time is cyclical, choice is an illusion, gods are ruled by their appetites, and the world will go on thus forever. It’s not the world of Yahweh, but the world of Zeus.

And yet, despair is the tribute that unbelief pays to faith. Chinatown wouldn’t be half as sad, or remotely as great—and it is very great—were it not a film that expected a good city and a righteous builder.

CELEBRATING LIBERTY:

Juneteenth: A Jubilee of Freedom (Andy Craig, June 19, 2020, Cato)

Aside from its anti‐​slavery origins, the popular adoption of Juneteenth over other possible dates serves as an example of culture and tradition arising organically rather than from official recognition, which only began in recent years. Today, forty‐​nine states (all except Hawaii) have made some form of official recognition for Juneteenth and there is a movement urging Congress to adopt it as an official national holiday. [Juneteenth became a federal holiday on June 17, 2021.] That would be fitting.

It might be a symbolic gesture but symbolism matters. The abolition of slavery and the suffering and contributions of black Americans deserve a prominent place in our national narrative. The festive, celebrative spirit of Juneteenth is particularly appropriate for this. The triumph of hope over adversity and liberty over slavery is very much worth celebrating.

STOP EXPLOITING THE DISORDERED:

German Study: Vast Majority of People Will Grow Out of Transgenderism Within 5 Years (Ben Johnson, 6/16/24, Daily Signal)

A massive, yearslong study shows the overwhelming majority of young people who identify as transgender will grow out of the diagnosis within five years.

A similar supermajority of trans-identifying people suffered from at least one other psychological condition, found researchers, who tracked all children and young adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria over a nine-year period.

It’s ideology, not medicine.

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

UNIVERSAL DARKNESS: On the definition of film noir. (Stanley Fish, 6/10/24, The Lamp)

Next year I shall be teaching a course in film noir for the first time, and I thought it might be useful to set down my thoughts about the genre. Definitions and lists of characteristics are not hard to come by. Many websites will tell you that film noir movies were shot in sharply contrasting black and white, made liberal use of flashbacks, and flourished between 1940 and 1958 with a number of “neo-noir” films, some in color, appearing even to the present day; that film noir heroes or anti-heroes are cynical, world-weary, bitter, and vulnerable to the seductive wiles of sensual and duplicitous women; that these men and women play out their doomed lives in a landscape of corruption, betrayals, double crosses, and plans gone awry; that everyone and everything in the film noir universe is at the mercy of chance, accident, and a general, even miasmic, malevolence; that these movies were especially appealing in the context of the pessimism generated by World War II and a post-war malaise brilliantly documented in a film that is not noir but has noir touches, William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

But for my money, this list of noir elements casts too wide a net. As far as I am concerned, it’s not noir unless at its center is a moment when a line is crossed and someone, almost always a man, starts on a path that leads inevitably not only to his own destruction but to the destruction of everyone and everything he touches. It is tempting to speak of this moment as a choice, but it is better characterized as a slide, a slide from what had been a more or less ordinary existence to a toboggan ride down to hell with no hope of a reversal of motion. Edward G. Robinson’s Barton Keyes (Double Indemnity, 1944) puts it best when he says of the lovers-murderers he has not yet fully identified, “It’s not like taking a trolley-ride together where they can get off at different stops. They’re stuck with each other and they’ve got to ride all the way to the end and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.”

The Hays Code gave us great art.