Leitmotif: “What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stick out above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence… The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms…” — H. L. Mencken[1]
Zodiaca: As you probably know by now, there’s a good chance that your astrological sign has recently been changed. For example, I went from being a Virgo (meticulous, fussy, analytical, given to worrying) to a Leo (generous, warmhearted, creative). Surely this is a clerical error.
I once read that more people know their sun sign than their blood type. This disturbs me a bit. After all, your blood type can really make a difference in your life. For example, I’m blood type A+, which makes me meticulous, fussy, analytical, and given to worrying.
(Obligatory rationalist tweak: During the Christmas season, I saw here and there the argument that teaching kids to believe in Santa Claus was good practice for teaching them to believe in God. Let’s set aside the rank polytheism of believing in a demigod like Santa. Do the faithful hold that belief in astrology is a similarly good practice for belief in God? Why or why not?)
No Sexe Please, We’re French: Here’s further proof that the world’s gone mad, as if we needed any.
This Is Awesome:
K-97 is well aware of the dangers of censorship and the effect it has on Canadian’s Freedom of Speech. K-97 has had many censorship attempts, but through it all the microphones are turned on everyday giving the announcers the freedom to say whatever is on their mind.
Earlier this week the CBSC ruled that the song “Money For Nothing” has violated broadcasting decency standards because of the use of the word “Faggot”. The Dire Straits song was originally released in 1985 and has since aired tens of thousands of times across Canada, has won a Grammy and has been performed by GLBT supporter, Elton John. If you listen to the context of the term, you will realize it is an artistic portrayal of a bigoted person looking at the riches and excess of the music industry.
While some of K-97’s content may be controversial, we respect the right to free speech for all Canadians and songwriters. That’s why K-97 has decided to go against the grain…yet again, and hold a “MONEY FOR NOTHING HOUR”. From 8pm – 9pm on Friday, January 14th, 2011 K-97’s Todd James will be playing the Dire Straits “Money For Nothing” unedited and non stop for the entire hour to express our deep concern about this decision and the precedent it sets.
As Wikipedia basically gets right:
Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.
But hey, if the bigots are rocking out to Dire Straits, we can’t be too careful, can we? There could be kids around! (Let’s not start in about Pink Floyd; R.E.M., which basically revisited “Money for Nothing”; or, for the love of mom, Eminem. We could go on, of course.)
A Quick Thought on Generative Culture: Here’s something I’ve wondered about regarding the commercialization of culture, the reaction against it, and the like. Triggered partly by this month’s Cato Unbound. And yes, you’re going to hate me for it.
Does anyone appreciate how much better commercial culture is than bottom-up generative culture?
I mean, I can write a competent bit of prose, but I work at that. I spend much of my waking life thinking about how to write clearly. I get paid for it, too, so it’s not really amateur culture. In my spare time I like to cook, and I don’t get paid for that. I’m okay at it, I think. People ask for seconds. They even show up for repeat dinner parties. But beyond writing and cooking, I just can’t produce all that much culture. Do you really want to hear me stumble through a bunch of half-learned Flaming Lips or Belle & Sebastian songs? On a guitar that I struggle to tune? Do you want to hear me sing them? Not if you know what’s good for you.
It’s worse than that. I can’t sew, can’t dance, can’t paint, can’t even draw. Never threw a pot. I wove a basket once (don’t ask). If the back-to-basics maker ethos were held at all consistently, there wouldn’t be much left to like about any of us.
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[1] Mencken may have been a racist, but if so, he was an equal-opportunity racist; he appears to have hated all the races more or less equally.
Heh. Those crazy Cannucks. Still Illegal to import and sell our films up there (All films must be passed by Provincial Film Revue Boards.) If we had something like that here in the good ‘ol’ You Ess of Aye, I’d have to make these films for free, which I wouldn’t.
I do occasionally build boats for free, but I pay someone else to design them!Report
Everything Mozart wrote, he wrote for money. Which isn’t to say that if he’d won a MacArthur grant [1] and been able to write without financial pressure, the results wouldn’t have been just as good or even better.
1. After (in one sense) the guy who got one for inventing the time machine.
P.S. They should be alternating Money for Nothing with Oliver’s Army.Report
ha, reminds of a wonderful quote I heard about about Alan Clark – “He was an equal opportunity bigot, he believed if you weren’t him you were inferior”Report
Today, we judge racism by words, and by that criteria, Mencken is a racist (though, as you point out, he’s every other kind of -ist, too). I’d rather judge HLM by deeds, and here’s an example:
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/100441/HL-Mencken-Courage-in-a-Time-of-Lynching.aspx
He also published a great number of African-American authors in the American Mercury.Report
Holy crap that link is amazing.Report
Seconded. After the foofara of the last week, it’s interesting hearing Mencken cruelly (and quite unfairly I may add) insult his fellow journalists, his town and his state over the work of a deranged mob. OTOH, this entirely separate Mencken quote is also relevant:
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Unfairly?
Two circulation trucks were ambushed, their papers thrown away, and their drivers beaten. Reporters who went to Salisbury to cover the story were threatened with violence. According to Mencken, one of the photographers, Robert F. Kniesche, “was saved from rough handling, and maybe even murder, only by escaping in an airship.”
The editor of the Easton Journal advised Mencken not to set foot on the Eastern Shore “for the next 20 years. In Salisbury, they’d rather lynch you.” He warned that Mencken’s toes, and perhaps his ears, might be taken as souvenirs.
It sounds to me like he had their number.Report
He’s a racist because he used bad language, but he’s a bad man because he called out other journalists for not writing the honest truth about lynching? Seems like there’s a contradiction there.Report
He might be called a racist in that he believed the races had enduring characteristics. He certainly seems to have written about the negative characteristics with more gusto. In this, I think he was naive — I would never write in that vein.
But when it came time to do the decent thing, he did. As in condemning lynching. Or when he mocked a prohibition on racially integrated tennis matches.Report
It pains me to have to say this, but the real point was that 80 years on Mencken’s intemperate attacks can be remembered fondly, while his attempt at high-minded reasonableness comes off quite poorly. But in the time, the former was the sort of unfair*, accusatory rhetoric that would tune out precisely the people that needed to be convinced.
* And yes, if you read his claims, Mike, they are completely unfair. Sure, they harbored violent brutish thugs, but he accused them of being one step removed from Tennesseans by golly.Report
And even worse, told them to go merge with Delaware, although it was years before Joe Biden.
For another take on the same subject, there’s Mark Twain’s The United States of Lyncherdom.Report
Mencken was a racist in that he truly believed in the importance racial and ethnic characteristics. He wrote an entire essay about George Bernard Shaw whose point was to demonstrate, by discussing his work, that Shaw was really Scottish, not Irish. (Not that dissimilar from the music critics who used to “prove” from his music that Haydn has Croatian ancestry.) Likewise, he considered Southern blacks in many ways (e.g. artistically) superior to their white neighbors, and explained this by their partial descent from the old Southern aristocracy.
This can all be taken too seriously, of course. (Quoting from memory) Alastair Cooke wrote that he was everything Mencken despised: an Englishman, a Methodist, and a golfer, and the result was that Mencken couldn’t have been kinder or more helpful to him.Report
“Your blood type can really make a difference in your life.”
It’s taken very seriously in Japan. A member of the cabinet a few years ago was in some kind of accident and needed a blood transfusion. After the transfusion the press went wild speculating on whether his necessarily changed personally would disrupt the dynamic of the administration.Report
But a transfusion would necessarily be the same blood type.Report
Everybody can receive O. I think in this case, the politician had blood type A or something and got O, so the press was wildly speculating about what kind of person would emerge from the hospital room and how the fragile dynamics of the government might be upset. It was like four years ago or so, so I can’t remember any details, but this all happened kind of right after I came to Japan, so it really stuck with me.Report
“Teaching kids to believe in Santa Claus was good practice for teaching them to believe in God”
Wow.Report
Have you read Hogfather?Report
I saw the movie.Report
As it happens the relevant bit is in the movie more or less intact.Report
Little know fact:
Everyone worked on that movie for free.Report
I’ve always wanted to read Terry Pratchett. I just can’t really stomache fantasy anymore, and his body of work is daunting. I like his beard though!Report
Reading his works would be daunting, but each book can pretty much be enjoyed on its own. I’d recommend Small Gods, which is purely a standalone, as a starting point.
As to not stomaching fantasy, take a few minutes to read “a href=”http://members.fortunecity.com/bookdepository/stories/pratchett/trollbridge/trollbridgetext.html”>Troll Bridge”, to see if Pterry’s take on things triggers your “Christ, not another bloated trilogy about a Quest” reflex.Report
Troll Bridge, that is.Report
Thanks Mike, I actually enjoyed that considerably. Maybe I’ll give a Pratchett novel a go someday.Report