Allan Bloom warned us in The Closing of the American Mind that relativists are incipient authoritarians. If right and wrong aren’t universal but are merely personal or social constructs, there’s no criterion for judging one person’s case against another’s. The decision can only go to the party with the most power. Not on any kind of principle, but because nature abhors a vacuum, just as gravity abhors unsupported coyotes.
The UK’s Telegraph revealed Saturday that Penguin Random House, which publishes Hemingway’s novels and stories, has slapped them with “a trigger warning” due to “concerns about his ‘language’ and ‘attitudes.’” Hapless new Hemingway readers are also “alerted to the novelist’s ‘cultural representations.’”
I can imagine what Ernest Hemingway himself would say to all this, but I wouldn’t be able to publish it. The arrogant, self-infatuated, blinkered, miseducated woke dopes at Penguin Random House don’t seem to understand that the whole idea of reading Hemingway, or any other great writer, is to encounter “language,” “attitudes” and “cultural representations” that are not one’s own, and are not the same as the language, attitudes, and cultural representations of contemporary culture.
As you may recall if you’re a regular reader here, I don’t like Hemingway much. Though his writing style was undeniably influential, I’ve never cared for his stories, and never worked up the interest to read any of his books. I don’t like his politics, and all I know about his personality repels me.
But you know how you can tell I’m not on the Left? You can tell because I think his books ought to be published straight. Adults should be trusted to have the maturity to handle ideas, words and imagery that might trouble or offend them.
Somebody made a comment on Twitter the other day to the effect that our times aren’t much fun. I replied, “Shoot, Prohibition was more fun than this.”
I think we ought to declare a new Roaring 20s. Let’s have speakeasies, places where you can speak easily. Say anything you bloody want. Leave your electronic devices in a Faraday Cage at the door, so nobody can listen in, and engage in old-fashioned forbidden conversation. All ideas permitted. No punching allowed, though.
In the current issue of World Magazine, veteran journalist Cal Thomas talks about the scant trust in new media and some of his experiences over fifty years. Here’s one.
One of my favorite stories about what maintaining integrity and “guarding your heart” in the Christian life can mean came, surprisingly enough, from the pornographer Larry Flynt. In 2007, Flynt was offering $1 million to anyone who could “out” a member of Congress or other public figure who was a “family values conservative” in rhetoric, but something quite different in private life. One day, Flynt rolled into Fox’s green room in New York in his wheelchair (he had been shot and paralyzed by a gunman in Georgia in 1978). After exchanging perfunctory greetings, he said to me, “I thought you’d be interested in something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“We did an investigation of you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Flynt said. “We didn’t find anything.”
I laughed. “Praise the Lord, a personal endorsement from Larry Flynt! You were just looking in the wrong place for my sins.”
Nostalgia: What do we make of the past? “A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence.”
Reading: Long-time editor and reviewer John Wilson offers a list of novels and books he’s looking forward to this summer, including the work of E.X. Ferrars and her Andrew Bassnet series, in which a retired botanist retires only to find he’s come across a murder.
The Soviet Man: In his book The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel “argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a ‘new Soviet person’ (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it, ‘The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born.'” What helped build this new person was a curious amalgamation: “Soviet Americanism.”
Anniversary: In Hong Kong, they will not forget what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. None of us should.
From @SJMelniszyn /Twitter
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
This week, I had one of those frequently repeated conversations about what we mean when we greet others with “Hello” and “How are you?” An earnest person might think it’s dishonest to ask someone how they are doing without expecting an answer and may feel a burden to share transparently when others ask them. You may have heard someone argue that Christians shouldn’t say they are fine when they aren’t fine; they shouldn’t paint on a smile when they’re going through a hard time.
But honesty doesn’t require complete transparency. That would expose us all to the fixers, who don’t know when to listen and when to advise. Greeting one another with a word or phrase is essentially verbal acknowledgement. We see and maybe recognize each other. We ask each other how’s the day or the doing or life at large as a way of well wishing. If we’re close to each other, we’ll want more than that, but even then, it may not be the time for it.
We can thank Thomas Edison for popularizing the word helloas a good way to answer the phone. Alexander Graham Bell (why do we give his full name so often? why not Alex Bell or Alexander G. Bell?) wanted us to us say ahoy, as if we were called out to someone in the distance. Prior to the phone, hello was a common word of surprise, which I suppose is the reason Bertie Wooster and co. say, “What ho!” regularly. The Online Etymology Dictionary says there are records from 1849 that show hello, the house as “the usual greeting upon approaching a habitation” in the American west.
Yes, yes, I suppose we should get on to other things, shouldn’t we?
Journalism: News outlets aren’t dead, but their owners may be trying to kill them. Ted Gioia has a compelling piece on news sites that wanted our clicks so bad they killed themselves, and now big news outlets appear to want to die the same way. “The company tried to maximize clicks with shallow gimmicks, when it should have been worrying about the articles themselves.”
Conservatism: A right-wing movement wants a big reset. John Ehrett says critics label it different things, but vitalism is a good name for it. “In place of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘three-legged stool’—free-market economics, military interventionism, and religious conservatism—the new vitalists would burn the place down altogether, and host a festival around the pyre.”
Bruce Springsteen: “He paints his masterpiece of America as a brand and what it does to people. To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that’s been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.” That storytelling was formed by a love of Flannery O’Connor.
Yesterday, WIRED published a curious story by Features Editor Jason Kehe with this title and subtitle: “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God: He’s the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He’s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.”
In over 4,000 words, he tells us Sanderson is a bad writer, his fans and family are overly devoted nerds, and his guest bathroom is awesome. He says he spent two days at a Dragonsteel conference talking to fans, many hours with the author in his home and over meals, and that he, the reporter, hates Hugh Jackman. There are many words on the opinions and efforts of the reporter himself. But what is the relationship suggested by the subtitle? That Sanderson is a millionaire fantasy writer and a Mormon. Can you feel the profundity dripping from that statement?
I can’t decide what this article actually is, because it isn’t a feature of a popular fantasy author. It could be an attempt at a substantive observation that Kehe couldn’t produce. It could be a salvaged second draft, because Kehe wanted to write about Mormonism using Sanderson as an anchor but WIRED didn’t want to publish it. Or it could be rage baiting, a piece written with the simple goal of saying, “Hey, kid, you know that thing you like? It stinks.”
Maybe it is an attempt at substance and the reporter (or the magazine) doesn’t have the depth to swing it. It also checks all the boxes for rage baiting. YouTube already has several reaction videos, and Twitter is not reserving its disgust.
Kehe seems to know all the mechanics of good writing, so I hope he finds better subjects for expressing them or a healthier publisher.
A Little More: Here’s a great contrast of this article with one from another magazine about another artist, written by Shane Morris of the Colson Center.
Jordan Peterson's 13th Rule for Life is (in part) to never carelessly denigrate creative achievement. Here are two contrasting profiles of creators (one fantasy author in WIRED, the other a pop star in Rolling Stone) that illustrate why this rule is important: pic.twitter.com/N8Fn9YqYXw
AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”
The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.”
The report describes the quick raid and says multiple sources believed it to be an FBI raid focused on James Gordon Meek. The article says, “Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus.”
But according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, Rolling Stone reporter Tatiana Siegel had originally included an important detail about the reason for the raid. “Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until [February 2023]. Why did Rolling Stone suggest Meek was targeted for his coverage of national security, rather than something unrelated to his journalism?”
According to Folkenflik, Noah Shachtman, Rolling Stone‘s editor-in-chief, covered up the pornography angle without Siegel’s collaboration. Siegel moved to another magazine weeks later.
But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
...
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey'd priest from the prophetic cell.
Easy Photo Fakes: With advancing artificially intelligent image generators, creating convincing pics from a handful of social media posts is fairly easy. The better images AI can create, the more dangerous it is to everyone. Maybe we should take our photos offline.
Why Journalists Fall for Hoaxes: “Every hoax in America the past 200 years originated in the news business, or passed through it. When the world moved much slower, hoaxes were publicity stunts carried out by newspapers.”
Beethoven and Christmas: “If beauty will save the world it must be qualified that love will save the world. Because in beauty we find love. In finding beauty and the love that governs it, we are always directed to the Christ who came into our lives and taught us how to love. St. Augustine said that we often first come to know God (who is Love) through the love of others and the love that others show us.”
And though this is not Beethoven, it’s a good Christmas share.
Three original arrangements by Tony Glausi, “A Christmas Jazz Medley”
James David Dickson remembers an old story of something D.C. Mayor Marion Barry Jr. said in front of a gaggle of reporters to make the point that what passes for reporting is largely just repeating what officials or newsmakers have said without comment or reflection.
Headlines like “Except for Murders, City is Safe, Mayor Says” are a credibility killer for the news business.
We expect politicians to be full of beans. We then expect the media to correct them. We don’t expect the press to thoughtlessly print whatever was said.
I have once again gathered up my hubris and sent an essay to The American Spectator. And once again, for unaccountable reasons, they have published it.
Honestly, I’m kind of proud of this one. It’s more upbeat than my usual stuff, and shows the influence of my recent Dave Barry reading.
The Future Library. Photo credit: traveldailymedia.com
I read every issue of “Viking,” the magazine of the Sons of Norway fraternal organization, of which I’ve been a humble member for longer than I care to contemplate. Often it contains interesting articles. Occasionally there’s even a picture of me, standing on the edge of some SON lodge activity, oblivious. And sometimes it gives me reason to laugh – though rarely on purpose.
The current, October, issue of “Viking” gave me a chuckle. Its cover article is called “Norway’s Secret Library,” and it describes a project called “The Future Library” (Framtidsbiblioteket) in Oslo.
The whole operation is complex and grandiose, but I’ll try to get the gist of it down here – if I can grasp it myself. It started with a Scottish artist named Katie Paterson. She came up with the idea for a library that would contain books by prominent writers that neither she nor anybody alive would ever live to read… for some reason.
A grove of 1,000 spruce trees were planted in a forest in Oslo in 2014. In 2114, those trees will be cut down and turned into paper, on which will be printed books written specially for the project by famous contemporary authors who participate by invitation. (Margaret Atwood got the first invitation. Imagine my surprise.) The Future Library itself has (if I understand the article correctly) been built from the trees initially felled to clear the area for this project. And I guess the building is going to just sit there for the next century, waiting like a time capsule.
You realize what’s happening here, don’t you? Mortality is catching up with my generation. Boomers. And they’re remembering how they treated the authors of the past. How they called for all the classics to be thrown out and burned, to make way for the Now, the With It, the Relevant. (“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”)
And they’re terrified future generations will treat them the way they treated the classics.
So they’re building themselves a pyramid. “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.” (Shelley wrote that, as you’ll know if you were educated before the Revolution.)
If these authors truly believed they’d produced literature for the ages, they’d trust posterity to recognize their achievement.
The Victorians admired Lord Bulwyer-Lytton, and considered Arthur Conan Doyle an insignificant scribbler of low-brow popular fiction. Today we laugh at Bulwer-Lytton, and scholarly works are devoted to Doyle.
That’s what I’m counting on for my own books. Posthumous posterity.
