Saul Degraw says:

H2: I actually can understand how someone would want to pay 3 million dollars for a condo. I can’t understand why someone would want to pay 3 million dollars to live underground. It does make sense that the guy made his money on nightclubs though I guess. 3 Million dollars should come with a commanding view of the SF Bay, Mount Diablo, NYC, or some other great panorama or at least location, location, location.

R1: I think it was really the no sex thing which is not very liberal. There were free love cults on the left in the 19th century. They usually had a Marxist bent. Garfield’s murderer was kicked out of a free-love cult.

R2: I think this is very complicated. My view on being Jewish in New York is that there are so many Jews in the NYC-Metro area that people can take their Jewishness for granted. Jewishness has permeated New York. It is also important to remember that there is a lot of Jewishness in the general culture because Jews create and somewhat still dominate Hollywood and TV. If you are Jewish outside of NYC, you need to work on maintaining your Jewishness though even in a city like San Francisco which has a long Jewish history. There is also the idea that intermarriage constantly is eradicating Jews and Jewishness. I’ve certainly expressed fears about how it is seemingly impossible for Jews to combat the awe of Santa and “Christmas Magic.” I also do get annoyed at what I call Kitsch or Joke Judaism which seeks to reduce 5000 years of culture and history to cheap jokes.

PO1: I generally think Drum is spot on here. The American public is probably not as conservative as the Tea Party wants it to be or as left as Thomas Frank wants it to be. LGM usually mocks Frank’s essays on the subject by calling it Green Lanternism or being “Leftier than Thou”. The problem is that there are probably select geographic pockets that are really as conservative as the Tea Party wants or as liberal as Thomas Frank wants but neither is enough to build a majority coalition. So if you big sorted yourself into super-liberal or super-conservstive land, you are going to be confused and disappointed. One of my big issues with my “anti-consumerist” crowd of friends is that I think they don’t understand why they are setting up the left to failure because they just surround themselves with other “anti-consumerists” largely.

Po4: Bruce seems like a rather pompous fellow. Conservatives often impress me with the pomposity and constant talk of “tradition” (read: entrenched privilege). You can fill a Zepplin with the pomposity coming from the dude. Probably several. I think the American Conservative article is more spot on especially when they are bringing up Kirsch’s article from Tablet. There is a lot of small c conservatism out there in novels but it tends to get missed because political conservatives tend to hyperfocus on the aspects that are not for them. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer is about middle and upper class New Yorkers (largely Jewish) who meet at an arts-based summer camp as teenagers. Some become super-successful artists, others do not. There are two long-standing married couples that meet and fall in love at relatively young ages and stick with each other through thick and thin. That seems fairly conservative to me. I suspect that in the political conservative mind the novel is not seen as conservative because it is about Jewish New Yorkers with artistic pretensions. The same dynamic is played out in the odious and cancerous gamergate. The moronic gamergaters real complaint seems to be “Wahhh! People are making games that I don’t want to play and aren’t focused on violent machismo! Wahhh!!”

Ps2: I am not sure I fully believe that responsibility is “paying your own way.” I think that is an ideal found very heavily in Anglo culture and not necessarily other places. I know a lot of people with serious trust fund money, I am talking millions of dollars or more. Some of them are party-hard decadents and most are pretty responsible people even if they do have a lifestyle that does not necessarily match their job income. I also think that there is something about the bubble aspect of a college campus that causes people to drink and party more and that there is not necessarily anything wrong with it. There should be an age when people get to have all that stuff spill out in a relatively safe manner. There is a lot of conservative pearl-clutching in this piece.Report