If Charles Joseph Minard were following the Clinton/Obama superdelegate battle. Nice connection.
Category: Politics
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and patrons and directors exerted more control over how we experience art:
The relative taming of the audience at the turn of the century was part of a larger development that witnessed a growing bifurcation between the private and public spheres of life. Through the cult of etiquette, which was so popular in this period, individuals were taught to keep all private matters strictly to themselves and to remain publicly as inconspicuous as possible… People were similarly taught to remove from the public to the private universe an entire range of personal reactions… The individual mirrored the increasing segmentation of society in a segmentation of self.
Bishop mentions in the interview that “The best-educated citizens are the least likely to have a political discussion with someone with a different opinion.” Public spaces and self-selection. Two interesting ideas that I hope Bishop talks about in his upcoming book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. It’s on my reading list. [via book design review]
“As unseemly as it is for America’s wealthiest people to strive for more money, America’s political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more.”
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (review: 5/5)
Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we get into the geographic discoveries of the Powell expedition, the explosion of Los Angeles and California farming during the Mulholland era, the massive federal projects of the Depression and World War decades, and the competition between two federal agencies that LOVE to build: the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Where great rivers ran we now have dams and reservoirs—around 75,000. Not to mention canals and levees and aqueducts. They’re a mixed blessing at best. Aside from the environmental impact, the amount of political maneuvering, folly, thuggery, and outright deceit that has gone into some of these projects is just incredible. Very few of the projects would have been possible without Federal involvement (read: subsidized by Eastern tax dollars). I don’t even consider myself “environmentalist” but still found it all pretty outrageous. Great book.
Really enjoyed the Frontline feature Bush’s War. Well worth a few hours.
Some behind-the-scenes video journalism from North Korea.
You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, an online essay + soundtrack, “was born out of fraughtful observations of the state of our States and the repetitive, empty monotony of consumer culture and electronic music.” [via waxy]
The Story of Stuff, a big-picture overview of consumption. The animation is surprisingly good at times and there’s some clever sound, too (shaky economics and eco-paranoia aside). “You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely.”
“The reality is that democracy is a very blunt instrument, and in todayÄôs environment we are choosing between ways of muddling through. We may hear that the election is about different visions for AmericaÄôs future, but the pitches may be more akin to selling different brands of soap.”
Video mash-up of political candidates talking about “Change” (ugh) + David Bowie’s song, “Changes.”
The Braindead Megaphone (review: 4.5/5)
There’s potential for a doctoral dissertation about The Rhetorical Use of Capital Letters in the Writing Of George Saunders. The usage comes in a couple flavors. There are the ineffable concepts, like Freedom and Humility. There’s the personalization of general categories, like Writers and the Little Guy. There’s the tongue-in-cheek categorization of human sub-groups, like, oh, People Who Analyze Capitalization. And it also appears when it’s simply more amusing, e.g. “Oversize Bright-Colored Toy Ships and Trucks.”
This was only my second try at Saunders. I aborted my attempt of In Persuasion Nation. Maybe it’s good. (I think I read so much non-fiction that I have trouble turning the switch every now and then.) And it wasn’t funny. But The Braindead Megaphone is funny. And it stays funny even though he writes about Serious Things and has a really earnest style.
To wander my way back to the Capitalization Issue, it reminds me of what Daniel Day Lewis said in a recent interview: “Perhaps I’m particularly serious because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing.” I think satirists like Saunders might agree. While the writing isn’t always serious, it is sincere, and I get the sense that he really kicks his own ass to come up with this stuff. Most of it is really, really good.
As for the meat of the book, the titular essay is a brilliant take on banal popular media. What’s really wonderful is the way he hedges and offers concessions along the way through his thought experiments. What could be a canned, all-too-familiar diatribe becomes a nice little Journey with George.
Another essay that I liked was about Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five. In one part he talks about how Vonnegut gives up on detail:
“Vonnegut was skipping the lush physical details he had presumably put himself into so much danger to obtain. He was assuming these physical details; that is, he was assuming that I was supplying them. A forest was a forest, he seemed to be saying, let’s not get all flaky about it. He did not seem to believe, as I had read Tolstoy did, that his purpose as a writer was to use words to replicate his experience, to make you feel and think and see what he had felt. This book was not a recounting of Vonnegut’s actual war experience, but a usage of it.”
Later, in an essay on Barthelme‘s short story, “The School,” Saunders offers his own thoughts on the writer-reader relationship:
“The writer is right there with us—he knows where we are, and who we are, and is involved in an intimate and respectful game with us. I think of this as the motorcycle-sidecar model of reading: writer and reader right next to one another, leaning as they corner, the pleasure coming from the mutuality and simultaneity of the experience.”
In addition to those gems, there’s some great writing on patriotism in a mock-academic “survey of the literature”; a welcome twist on the tired Letters To & From An Advice Columnist genre; reporting on Minutemen and border patrol; and probably my favorite of a bunch, an awesome essay on what’s so difficult and wonderful about Huckleberry Finn. The only real duds for me were the foreign reporting essays in Dubai and in Tibet. Skip those, and read everything else.
I grow to love Ill Doctrine more with every post, like his take on the Clinton/Obama handshake controversy.
An essay on the past and the future of marriage.
Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections is a new documentary about voting manipulation and the disastrous state of our polling systems. The trailer strikes a balance of citizen activism and paranoia that I usually get a kick out of.
“There are only two kinds of reform that have any chance of actually reducing total expenditure on presidential elections. The first is to reduce the value of the presidency itself… The second is to reduce the uncertainty about who’s going to win.” I vote for the former.
Arnold Kling on politics and cults:
I do not know Ron Paul. He may be wise. He may be decent. But to dismiss all doubts about his judgment and his character would be to succumb to a cult.
Let me hasten to add that I do not think of the Paul cult as unique. I am equally loathe to join the Clinton cult, the Obama cult, the Guiliani cult…you name it.
For me, democratic politics is a “lesser of evils” game, and I’m never sure how best to play it. But I have to say that when I read that this year’s New Hampshire primary had a record turnout, it made my heart sink rather than warm. Not that I’m against voting, but I hate to think of people as buying into anyone’s political campaign.
“After Darwin, after Einstein—just as after Galileo and Copernicus—we can’t have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.” An interview with theologian John Haught on science, faith, and the troubles of the new atheism.
Mark Larson 