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ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
ELSEWHERE:
AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:
One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.
Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.
Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.
TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.
LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.
Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.
On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.
But the differences go deeper.
Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.
Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.
What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.
For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.
It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.
More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.
MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?
A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….
I’VE OFTEN LIKED to define “Northwest environmentalists” as the people who moved here in the ’80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the ’90s.
Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring “It All” with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony “regional cuisine” restaurants, and particularly increased wear-‘n’-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.
(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)
Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow–more “natural,” more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.
Which brings me to today’s book–Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that “a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.”
Therefore, to ridicule somebody’s ideas or visions as “fantasy,” “myth,” or “escapist” is more than insulting. It’s a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.
For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got “advanced” enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.
For another example, here’s his quite rational argument against the E-droppers’ hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
“Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not–apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system–is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine’s euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness–the larger pattern….”
As you might surmise, Tuan’s a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of “escape” and “escapism” as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored…. “Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored….
“Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
Thankfully, history’s had its share of ladies ‘n’ gents who’ve dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.
TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club’s only a movie.
YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.
If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.
The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.
But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.
As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.
And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.
So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?
In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.
To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.
Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.
But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.
Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.
As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.
TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.
TODAY’S AN “OFF-OFF-YEAR” ELECTION, the kind where neither Presidents, Congresspeople, nor state legislators stand up for the picking.
My town holds its big municipal elections during odd-numbered years, so as to give its own politicians the spotlight.
And, as it happens, the Talk-Radio Right has one of its “across-the-board tax cut” schemes on the ballot, in the form of a state initiative.
And, as it also happens, the state initiative and the Seattle City Council elections both turn out to involve appeals to “We The People” against the common enemy of both rightish “populists” and leftish “progressives”–the corporate middle-of-the-road.
The eternally-lovable Jim Hightower likes to say there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But so far, the center has managed to hold, at least in segments of the American system–albeit as a center that’s drifted steadily rightward.
The Religious Right has had fewer successes in its attempts at “morals” legislation in recent years; the prog-left has been equally unsuccessful at reforming health care or getting working folks a fairer share of the economic boom.
Instead, big business and its wholly-owned politicians have pretty much had a free run in the U.S. Executive Branch, in the Federal Reserve System, and in many state and local jurisdictions. All the talk in the post-Reagan era about new paradigms or the end-of-politics-as-we-know it has, thus far, still found the entrenched old-line powers-that-be still being.
That doesn’t mean they’re not running scared, at least around these parts.
Seattle news media are chock full of heavy-handed wrangling over the potential devastating effects of Initiative 695, which would replace graduated-rate motor vehicle taxes with a flat $30 fee–and would impose tuff referenda requirements any time the Washington legislature wanted to add any new revenue source.
As phony-populist “across the board” tax cuts go, this is a particularly clever fraud. It cuts just enough from average folks’ car taxes to seem like a sensible bargain to average voters. But it cuts hundreds or even thousands from what the big boys pay for their Lamborghini SUVs.
And the funds it cuts from include funds targeted for transportation (including the new regional light-rail scheme as well as road-fixing) and those used by the state to prop up county governments.
I-695’s so extreme, the business lobby loathes it. It would potentially cripple some of the basic infrastructure business needs to get its goods trucked around, and the referendum part would make it damn difficult for the state to create new business-subsidy plans, like those used for the new baseball and football stadia.
But the Washington State Republican leadership felt it needed the talk-radio gang’s rabblerousing capabilities more than business’s patronage, and endorsed 695. No matter what happens in today’s vote, a possibly permanent rift has been created between the Rabid Right and the corporate powers who used to be its chief beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, five of the nine Seattle City Council seats are for grabs (all are citywide races).
In four of these contests, self-styled “progressive” candidates (Curt Firestone, Judy Nicastro, Charlie Chong, and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck) not only won their primaries but won by big enough margins that they’re threatening, with fellow prog-candidate Dawn Mason and incumbent prog Nick Licata (whose re-election bid comes in the next half-cycle), to form a majority coalition that could push for renters’ rights, slow the pace of gentrification, and block new subsidies for corporate-backed development plans.
And oh yeah–they also just might, if given half the chance, officially call BS on city attorney Mark Sidran’s “civility” laws, a systematic war on poor people, black people, young people, and anybody else who doesn’t fit the downtown business establishment’s upscale-boomer target market.
So some members of Sidran’s upscale fan base, led by a Microsoft executive (as if those guys knew a damn thing about “civility”), are spending “soft money” on behalf of the progs’ opponents.
In a municipal system traditionally run by corporate-Democrat machine politics, we’ve got a real, essentially partisan, race here. Should be fun.
TOMORROW: A self-styled “alternative” magazine whines about not getting the opportunity to sell out to big advertisers.
HERE’S ANOTHER PIECE I wrote for Everything Holidays. It’s already generated some angry letters by millennium-in-2001 purists.
Some nitpickers insist the new millennium won’t start until the year 2001.
Their justification: There was no Year Zero (despite a ’50s science fiction film, Panic in the Year Zero).
So a decade, century, or millennium doesn’t really start with a “zero” year but a “one” year.
But these well-meaning attempts at precision ignore the fact that calendar-making has always been a less than precise art.
As University of Florida computer-network administrator Thomas Hintz writes, “The calendar is a man-made device. It is an artificial method for defining the passage of time.”
Most civilizations have tried to divide time according to the cycles of the sun and moon, to the best of their ability to do so. But the names of these divisions, and their start and end points, are a matter of human creativity.
The Western World runs on the Gregorian Calendar, established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and based largely on the suggestions of Naples physician Aloysius Lilius and Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius.
Gregory wanted a more accurate calendar than the Julian system, which had been Europe’s standard since the days of ancient Rome. It was Lilius who came up with a more refined system of leap years, to make up for the fact that the solar year takes a little longer than 365 exact days. He also erased eleven days, to make up for past slippage.
The first day of the Gregorian Calendar, October 15, 1582, directly followed October 4, 1582 under the Julian Calendar.
Some European countries (particularly Catholic countries) adopted the Gregorian Calendar right away; others took a while. Great Britain and its colonies didn’t adopt it until 1752.
That’s why George Washington was born on a February 11, but his birthday was celebrated with a holiday on February 22, until it was morphed into the always-on-a-Monday Presidents’ Day.
(Some other nations didn’t fully go Gregorian until the 1920s.)
If that’s not confusing enough, the Gregorian Calendar was built on top of an established year-numbering system that had been back-dated to start with what religious scholars at the time believed to have been the year Jesus Christ was born.
But even that’s become a matter of latter-day disputes. Some historians now believe Jesus could have been born anywhere from five years before to a year after the now-official Year 1.
The next year is called 2000 A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “Year of Our Lord”) because, about a thousand years prior to the Gregorian Calendar’s adoption, a Catholic monk named Dionysius Exiguus was asked by the church to calculate future years’ dates for Easter (based on the Jewish passover, which in turn is based on a complicated formula involving full moon and the vernal equinox).
According to calendar scholar Claus Tondering, “At that time it was customary to count years since the reign of emperor Diocletian; but in his calculations Dionysius chose to number the years since the birth of Christ, rather than honour the persecutor Diocletian.”
Dionysius chose to base his research on what he figured was the birth year of Jesus Christ. Eventually, the church officially adopted his figures, in the year that was proclaimed to be 523 A.D. (Some non-Christians prefer the alternate designation “C.E.,” for “Common Era”.)
So, since year-numbering is so arbitrary, go ahead and celebrate the millennium on 1/1/2000. Then next year, you can join the nitpickers and celebrate the millennium all over again.
I haven’t responded personally to the picky complainers’ emails, but I’ll do so collectively here: Hey, it’s just numbers! And Jesus was probably born over 2,000 years ago by now anyway!
(More info is at Calendar Zone and at Frequently Asked Questions About Calendars.)
TOMORROW: Everything Is Go, Astroboy!
A MICROSOFT ‘PERMATEMP’ of my acquaintance recently described a heated political discussion she’d had with a co-worker. The co-worker, being a good manic Microsoftie, was insistant that those pesky governmental authorities oughta stop meddling in the inalienable right of big corporations to do any damned thing they wanted to do.
As she explained to me about him, “He’s a libertine.”
She meant he’s a Libertarian–part of an organized movement and political party whose ideology I won’t fully discuss here, but which basically hates both personal-morality laws (such as drug prohibitions) and business-regulation laws (such as antitrust and pollution controls).
But in retrospect, the term “libertine” might also have applied. I don’t know a thing about this particular co-worker, but I’ve certainly known a few other cyber-capitalist true believers who could easily fall under one or more of the dictionary definitions of a libertine–“One who acts without moral restraint,” “a dissolute person,” “one who defies established precepts.”
These cyber-libertines I know think nothing of sticking fraudulant handicapped-parking cards in the windows of their Benzos. They spend money not only to disable their Harleys’ mufflers, but to use mechanical tricks to make ’em louder. To these guys (they’re not all guys, just most), the ‘civil society’ is a crutch for weaklings and saps.
One alleged extreme libertine is Patrick Naughton.
You might remember Naughton as the high-rising Disney/Infoseek/Go Network exec who got caught up in a sting operation last month. The feds claim they caught him on an in-person meeting he’d arranged thru chat rooms with someone he thought was a 13-year-old female, but who was really a law-enforcement agent out to nab pedophiles. (As of last week’s arraignment, Naughton’s denied the charges and promised a vigorous defense.)
At the time of the arrest, some observers wondered out loud whether the very qualities that had propelled Naughton so high in the Net biz could also have driven him into imagining himself above the law of the land and one of the western world’s most universal social taboos.
One unnamed Net-biz person was quoted as saying he didn’t want to publicly dis Naughton because he might have to work with a Naughton supporter in some future gig. “The Internet industry now is not so much about technology; it’s about relationships and doing deals.”
Of course, “relationships” and “doing deals” were what got Naughton into this trouble in the first place, according to the prosecution.
But is his alleged behavior really a particular outgrowth of Internet-age hypercapitalism?
Is there something about that particular industry that rewards predatory, ruthless, monomaniacal mindsets, the kind of thinking that allows for no considerations beyond one’s own personal wants and obsessions?
I don’t think so.
Assorted adult straight and gay men, and a few adult women, have chased after teen and preteen mating targets in assorted times and places throughout the species’s history–in places as disparate as ancient Greece, George III-era England, and late-industrial Japan.
It’s a common sex-fantasy; but one many (probably most) Western Hemisphereans and Europeans feel should remain taboo, for very defensible reasons. (Some people, including a few who are also sympathetic to pro-business politics, have called for a reconsideration of the taboo and the laws enforcing it; their arguments, and the counter-arguments against them, are also beyond the scope of today’s discussion.)
But for now, let’s acknowledge that those accused of intergenerational sex, and those who’ve advocated its decriminalization, have been from all walks of life, from elective politics to insurance to religion. It’s not an Internet thing; it’s not a straight or gay thing; it’s not even a ‘guy thing.’
It’s a human thing.
MONDAY: So when’s this new millennium start anyway, and does it really matter?
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, in which she claims that there’s no universal male conspiracy against women and that the socio-emotional problems faced by many current males are due neither to any supposed innate male evility nor to feminist ball-busters, but rather to a social and economic system that values money and power, and which devalues the personal worth of individuals of all genders.
Still, it’s one thing for a female author of impeccible feminist credentials to speak out in sympathy toward men.
It might be even more provocative for a male to proclaim male equality–not superiority, but equality.
That’s what illustrator/performance artist Douglas Davis did recently in two essays for the New York Press, “The Wick vs. the Prick: Heterophobia and the Gender Wars” and “Phallus Rising: Or, the Prisoner of Joy.” (The original pieces are no longer on the paper’s site (it maintains only its current issue on its site), but Davis has put it up somewhere on the “Hyper Texts” section of his own site and also has a forum site based on some of the ideas in them.)
Some of his ideas:
We need yang as much as yin; masculine energy can be a force for good; it’s perfectly OK to be a male (or a female who actually likes males); and, if we play our cards right, the next century could lead toward a “Wild Future” in which we get beyond such superficial arguments and instead learn to celebrate our selves and our others’ selves–female, male, straight, gay, bi, wild, mild, and everything else.
Some of my takes on these ideas:
I’m just old enough (42) to have discovered sex at the exact same time the mass media did. I didn’t get the valuable lesson that if the media were lying to me about sex they must be lying to me about other topics. Nor did I grow up in an America where hardcore video was easily borrowable from your next-door-neighbor’s parents’ basement.
Early-’90s style hardcore porn turns me off, as do the Brit-inspired “bloke magazines” such as Maxim. Both are predicated on a soulless, brainless, heartless stereotype of male heterosexual desire; a stereotype ultimately not far from that of certain sexist female essayists.
Allegedly “sex positive” ideologies that try to limit the range of permissible nongay sexual behavior to masturbation, chaste S/M, and media-mediated fantasies only make things worse. They reinforce the ultimate loneliness of the late-modern condition. They promote the orgasm as just another consumer activity, no more life-changing or world-changing than a really good bottle of wine.
Yes, there will be a Wild Future. But not quite the way the “dildonics” advocates proposed it seven or eight years back. Rather, it will be a celebration of all sexualities (male as well as female; hetero as well as gay; “Total Woman” Christians as well as leather-Goth-neopagans). At its center will be the central act of biological existence, M/F coitus. In a post-mass world, all the countless other sex expressions (lesbian, gay, transgender, assorted fetishes and kinks) will continue to blossom; but the central act will remain the figurative maypole around which all these other variants dance their joyous dances, sometimes glancing back at the maypole and sometimes not.
I oppose the dichotomy that claims there can only be two kinds of nongay male sexuality: evil and suppressed. We must promote positive notions of masculinity, neither brutal nor emasculated, neither dominant nor submissive, not against women but with women.
TOMORROW: A few more old buildings and their hidden tales.
A NUMBER OF recent books and essays are questioning one of the central “received ideas” of the Lifestyle Left–the notion that males, particularly heterosexual males, constitute some sort of inborn and irretrievably evil subspecies.
You’d think the notion that 40 percent of the human race shouldn’t be stereotyped or collectively dehumanized, particularly by folks who claim to be all about “celebrating diversity,” should be a well-duh.
But nope, it’s taken a while for the idea to catch on.
Some well-meaning psychology-types put out a few books such as Real Boys, whose basic premises include: Girls aren’t the only kids with problems. We shouldn’t treat adolescent identity crises and emotional traumas as if only girls got them. Stop scoffing at the very idea of males having souls or needing help. So what does at least one reviewer do? Scoff at the very idea.
Then comes Susan Faludi, whose ’91 book Backlash was widely misinterpreted (even by readers who liked it) as portraying an organized, deliberately anti-woman conspiracy of All (or Most) Men against All Women. It actually detailed a bunch of generally-reactionary government and corporate trends during the Reagan-Bush era, as they specifically affected feminist issues.
(Before that, Faludi worked at the Wall St. Journal, where she wrote a highly influential expose of Nordstrom’s labor practices.)
Faludi’s now come out with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man– not a repudiation of Backlash but an expansion of its real premises. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Faludi’s point here: It’s not Men Against Women and it never was. What we’ve really got isn’t a “Patriarchy” but a profit-and-power society that treats most anybody as an expendable, replacable part. Feminism isn’t to blame for men who’ve lost their sense of place in the world, it’s the forces that really run things (like globalized business and the non-community of suburban angst) you should look at.
Indeed, she continues, to blame some collectivized entity called “Women” or “Men” for one another’s problems only prevents you from more clearly seeing a social structure that keeps us down and out and blaming each other.
So far, Faludi hasn’t gotten the kind of sneers the “boy books” have gotten. (Though she has gotten milder scorn such as this.) Maybe because of her feminist-insider credentials, or because certain neo-sexist critics might accept a female author speaking in sympathy for men but might trash a male author who tried to say the same things.
Or, I hope, because Faludi’s argument provides an escape route beyond the ideological recursive trap that is the Lifestyle Left.
Faludi’s saying the purpose of a real progressive movement is to seek progress, not merely to let its own members boast of their personal moral superiority. Man-bashing’s as dumb as woman-bashing, and just as futile. It’s not Us vs. Them, Good People vs. Bad People. It’s much more impersonal than that. And the impersonality of the system is one of its problems.
Faludi’s leading toward something I’ve dreamed of for years, an American Left that worked (both “work” as in achievement and as in at least getting up to actually do something).
MONDAY: We’ll talk about an actual man who dares to speak out for men (not against women but with them).
MY FIRST BEEF about James Gleick’s new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything has to do with a passage near the end, about the mind’s ability to discern patterns in strings of numbers (part of a discussion on short-term memory and people’s ability to receive information at accelerated rates).
Gleick mentiones several such sequences of numerals (prime numbers, numbers divisible by seven, etc.), then gets to a sequence “any New Yorker, for instance, will recognize.”
He never bothers to tell non-New Yorkers what “14, 18, 23, 28, 34, 42, 50, 59, 66, 72” is supposed to represent. He just assumes everybody in North America’s so into NYC local lore that they’ll recognize these as the street numbers of Manhattan subway stations.
Of course, the fact that I (as one who’s only been to NYC twice) was able to guess this answer (which Gleick confirmed to me in an email exchange) may be part of Gleick’s intended lesson–that human minds can figure out puzzles like this with only minimal clues.
The rest of Gleik’s story is pretty much what you (if you’ve got the nimble mind he thinks you’ve got) could predict it to be. For those of you whose lives are too hectic to even read the book (a briskly-paced tome, with short paragraphs and lotsa chapter breaks), a summary:
But there are exceptions and caveats in Gleick’s oh-so-linear timeline.
Movies and novels these days can be frighteningly long. The new Star Wars runs a whole half-hour longer than the original. Passions, that new “youth oriented” soap opera, is decidedly leisurely-paced (one day in the story can take up to two weeks of episodes). Net-browsing and video-gaming might seem exciting, but can be among the greatest time killers ever invented. Rush-hour freeway speeds in many metro areas are slowing down to bicycle rates. Today’s most heavily-hyped fantasy vehicle isn’t the sports car (promising mastery of the clock) but the SUV (promising a make-believe world outside the clock’s reach).
Gleick might say these are fantasy-realm counterparts to an ever-faster reality. I’d say they’re parts of a more complex set of figures than Gleick’s ready to deal with.
Stuff involving (directly or indirectly) electronics and computers is indeed always getting faster, smaller, cheaper, etc. Everything else in life still runs by basic scientific laws. Faster-than-sound flight is possible, but usually impracticable. Puberty, gestation, digestion, alcohol absorption, clinical drug trials, falling in and out of love, pretty much take as long as they always have.
As that favorite old computer-geek bumper sticker used to say, “186,000 Miles Per Second. It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law.”
TOMORROW: Susan Faludi and other writers dare to insist that men are people too–why’s this treated as something shocking?
MOST EVERYBODY LOVES ODD STUFF. Strange events. The unknown. The wacky, the wild, the bizarre.
Even stiff-upper-lip Brits.
Especially those Brits who read and write for the quarter-century-old journal The Fortean Times (named for pioneer odd-stuff researcher Charles Fort, and now published by the same folks behind the bad-bloke magazine Bizarre and the bad-boy satirical comic Viz).
One of the mag’s chief researchers,Mike Dash, has now come out with Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown. It’s been out in the U.K. for a few months now; the U.S. edition might be available this week or within a few weeks.
The book’s a long, leisurely intro to all sorts of odd and quasi-supernatural stuff around the world, past and present. Think of it as a quaint stroll through just about everything that seems to happen or to have happened, and which can’t be firmly, rationally explained.
What you get: UFO sightings and alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Yetis. Ghosts and poltergeists. Crop circles. Miraculous relics, stigmata, and Mary sightings. Stonehenge and mystery spots. Ley lines and energy centers. Dear-death and out-of-body experiences. Seances and spirit guides. Mediums and ESP. The face of Jesus in tacos and Arabic script in vegetables. Fairies, gnomes, goblins, and wildmen. British authors who claimed to really be Tibetan wise men. Carlos Castaneda and Uri Geller. Time travelers and clairvoyants.
And of particular interest to our local readers: Bigfoot! The famous 1947 “Flying Saucer” sighting near Mt. Rainier! The Olympia “Satanic cult” scare, eventually blamed on false-memory syndrome. Ogopogo, British Columbia’s own mythical lake monster. Reports of a similar beast in our own Lake Washington in 1987, found to really be an 11-foot sturgeon. The mirage-like “Silent City” visions in Alaska.
But plenty of books, movies (documentary, fictional, and in between), zines, comix, and TV specials and series have explored some or all of these topics. What sets Borderlands apart is Dash’s personable-yet-levelheaded tone (he’s a Cambridge Ph.D.) and his attitude of informed, open-minded skepticism. He’s ready to call a fraud a fraud (Castaneda). He’s all for scientific and material evidence behind strange occurrances, when and where such evidence might be found. And he’s open to both rational and supernatural explanations for this stuff.
But, ultimately, the phenomena he chooses to include in this book are phenomena which remain unsolved, unproven, unconfirmed. Something that has become known and proven, such as hypnosis, is something that’s now within the rational realm. The “borders” of knowledge referred to in the title keep moving back, but the borders’ length, and the size of the area beyond them, may remain as large as ever.
TOMORROW: Celebrating one year exclusively online.
CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.
(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)
Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.
The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.
Selling movie tickets.
By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.
A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.
Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.
From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.
From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.
From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.
The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.
But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?
You get The Iron Giant.
A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.
But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.
The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.
What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.
The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.
But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.
TOMORROW: A new book treats strange-phenomena with Brit-reserve skepticism.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s second annual list of pop-cult references incoming college students know about that their profs might not, and vice versa.
Never one to let a good shtick go uncopied, I asked for your recommendations in this regard.
While the ever-voracious nostalgia industry keeps bringing back old songs, fashions, movies, cars, and foods, many important aspects of bygone life remain bygone.
Thus, based partly on some of your suggestions, this list of cultural reference points distinguishing today’s fake-ID bearers from pathetic fogeys such as myself:
As late as the early ’70s, college English profs could assign their students as many as 100 books for one semester; thanks to cheap paperback editions, the kids could afford to buy ’em all.
Now, only fogeys remember that comic books had ever been for kids.
Newspapers were also a lot more popular back when they were more populist, something the entire industry’s forgotten.
IN OTHER NEWS: Who needs freakin’ ideological “battles of the sexes”? Let’s get on with the real thing!
TOMORROW: Concluding this series, some things young adults know that fogeys probably don’t.
