Gene C. Fant Jr.'s Blog, page 5

First Links — 1.28.14

Read Shakespeare’s Comedies First

John R. MacArthur,
Harper’s

Elizabeth Scalia’s Strange Gods: A Review

Enoch Kuo,
Fare Forward

The Increasingly Elastic “Pro-Life”

Mark Tooley,
American Spectator

The Last Place on Earth Without Human Noise

Rachel Nuwer, BBC

St. Peter, Lost and Found

Brad Miner,
Catholic Thing

Queen Latifah’s Grammy Mass Wedding

At the Grammys last night Queen Latifah officiated a mass wedding ceremony—with some couples heterosexual, some gay—followed by a surprise song from Madonna.

Was it satire? I am a big fan of satirical mockery, even
satirical mockery of important things such as marriage. Such satire helps
expose self-importance and can even help check things such as corrupt or sloppy
thinking. But satire is only satire
when it comes from a position of weakness or involves self-mockery. Satire from strength is not funny and more
akin to propaganda.

Hollywood, of course, is neither weak in terms of cultural
influence nor particularly noted for self-mockery. In fact, all of the evidence (the genuine
earnestness of the couples, the tears, the presence of Madonna, the fact it
took place on stage at the Grammys) indicated that this was not satire. Instead,
it represented a brilliant fusion of two of the great cultural tendencies of
our day: the pressing of Hollywood celebrities into positions of cultural
authority which gives them powerful influence far beyond their ability to hold
a note or to learn a script; and the transformation of the serious and the
sacred into the idioms of showbusiness. Queen
Latifah appearing in the place of a priest or minister is neither an unexpected
nor an isolated phenomenon but of a piece with what has been happening since
the invention of the moving picture. And
entertainers now do it all: politics, ethics, confession, marriages, cure of
souls.

Where this will lead is not easy to say. Traditional political institutions seem
comparatively impotent in the face of an entertainment industry which grips the
imagination in a way that the gray suited denizens of Washington or Westminster
do not. It also capitalizes on the
endless public appetite for distraction and the desire for self-fulfillment
rather than social good (as if the last term even has any agreed meaning). The
construction of logical and even legal argument is now increasingly irrelevant to
the way the world is moving. It is the
priests of emotional aesthetics, the celebrities, who drive the values of our
culture.

Pop music used to be about superficial fun, a bit of
escapism in the midst of life. Then it
gained messianic aspirations. At the
time, it looked ridiculously self-important.
It is still superficial fun; but perhaps it does not look quite so
ridiculous any more.

Jefferson Airplane’s Warning

Carl’s Rock Songbook is a series focusing on a particular rock song or issue connected to rock music. 

In the course of my learning the Gen-X alternative rock
catechism, perhaps it was when I was reading an issue of Spin magazine sometime in the 80s, I was told that the release of
The Velvet Underground’s first LP in 1967 was a symbolic rejection, by those
NYC bohemians in the know, of the Counter-Culture creed of Love, Drugs, and
Easy Hedonism emerging on the opposite coast.  Songs like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for My Man” gave you the dark side,
that is, the reality, about drugs,
and songs like “Femme Fatale,” “There She Goes Again,” and “Venus in Furs,”
gave you the reality about love/sex. This
eventually led to the more fulsome reaction against the insufferable idealism
of the hippie dream by Punk and New Wave. Bowie, Bangs, Iggy, Kraftwerk, the Ramones,
the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie, Echo, and Joy Division, they all in one way or
another drew inspiration from the mighty VU, and its provacative dismissal of the San
Francisco creed.

In my last several Rock Songbook posts I’ve been considering
what that creed said about Love, particularly through the songs of the early
Jefferson Airplane. I highlighted band leader Marty Balin’s 1966 claim that all the songs we do are about love, and analyzed
the way their first LP connected the advocacy of fraternal love in “Let’s Get
Together,” with that of romance and free-love in the rest of the songs. I also
showed how members of the Airplane were not entirely unaware of the ways the
quest for Love could go wrong. If they
most notably sang songs celebrating eros,
that is, romantic couple-love, not all of these songs came with unambiguously “happy
endings.”

Now when the Airplane brought Grace Slick into their band in
late 1966, they had to decide whether to bring some of her songs in as well,
that is, whether or not to adopt them as Jefferson Airplane songs. I suppose adopting “White Rabbit” was a
no-brainer, but adopting “Somebody to Love” was, I suspect, a trickier
decision.The Airplane had branded
themselves as champions of Love, and here was a song antithetical to that.
(Slick’s earlier band The Great Society had titled it “Someone to Love”
and it was actually written by Grace’s then-brother-in-law Darby Slick)

The song’s real power, I think, is right in the couplet that
opens it:

When the truth is
found, to be lies,

and all the joy, within you dies!

Bam! This particular person is wrenched right
out of the gentle love-stream the
Airplane sings about elsewhere, out
of the warm and wide-eyed generosity toward the world felt in the early stages
of being in love. The beloved has been
lying, and is in fact an unlovely
person. It all meant nothing, and the
response is one of rage, and despair.

And while we feel that the singer knows something of what it
is to experience this moment, for the rest of the song she is more an observer
than an empath-izer. This is not going to
be a song where the complaints against former beloved are aired. Rather, its about showing how the lover, the “you” of the song, is messed-up.

So if you’ve had a horrible break-up, you can play
this song, revel in its declamatory anger, and it will seem that the singer is
with you—but actually, she is more like some cold-eyed goddess looking down upon
you, regardless of the anger she is helping you to stoke.

Should it really be the case, she implicitly asks, that all your joy now dies?  Did you invest too
much into hippie slogans, say, ones found in those Marty Balin liner notes, where he spoke of his generation
having …an identification with love
affairs…explaining who you are and all that?

Here are the opening lines of Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, from “Blues from an Airplane”:

Do you know, how sad it
is to be a man alone?

…without
you, don’t know what to do, and I don’t
know where to go.

In that song, the seeking out the love, the
“getting together,” is the solution. Eros
redeems the jet-age blues. Contrast with this:

Don’t you want somebody to love?

Don’t you need somebody to love?

Wouldn’t you love somebody to love?

You better find somebody to love.

Here, the love-seeker (this time, apparently female—tears are running down your dress) is
being criticized for assuming that love is the answer, that running to the next
love affair is what the situation requires.  “Better find somebody to love” is
not, for this hapless “you” a recommendation,
but a critical observation of what she is all too likely to conclude. It is the emblem of her pathetic
desperation—of course her friends begin to distance themselves, treating her like a guest. 

Being in love with love is, or can become,
unhealthy.

So the Airplane of late ’66 back-tracked on, or made a
qualification to, what the Airplane of early ’66 seemed to have advocated.

Think that is too strong?  Think, “Hey, they just knew it was going to be a hit!”  Well, listen to their version of it, and
particularly to the moment around 0:32 when Grace adds a deadpan “love” to the end of the line.

Sure, Surrealistic
Pillow, still has those folk-rock moments that revel in the new way of
Love, such as “D.C.B.A. 25,” “How Do You Feel?,” and particularly, “My Best
Friend.” But along with “Somebody to Love,” there are much darker notes being
sounded now, such as “Plastic Fantastic Lover” and “3/5 of a Mile in 10
Seconds,” songs that show a growing awareness of how free-love can be
abused. And to the Airplane’s credit,
songs like “Today” and “She Has Funny Cars,” which certainly could have fit
into poetic “love-world” of their first LP, remain alive to the pain and
uncertainty ever-present in eros… …a sense that melts away in the worst hippy-dippy propaganda such as Lennon’s
“All You Need Is Love.”

“Somebody to Love” is
evidence that right from the get-go, rock artists on the counterculture’s cutting edge saw that
lots of those coming to their New Happening would not quite get it, would inevitably
over-do it, and would prove all too needy for the love-magic they were
musically mixing. I don’t know what could
have humbled Jefferson Airplane enough to really think twice about what they
were up to, that is, about the mytho-poetic fire they were playing with, which really would produce quite a few “casualties,” literal and otherwise, as the 60s progressed.  But this song shows us that
they didn’t need Lou Reed and co. to give them reservations about deifying
Love, and, that we can’t find them completely guilty of doing so.

First Links — 1.27.14

The Secular Is Haunted [audio]

James K. A. Smith,
Theos

Reviewing Reviews: Where Will It All End?

Sam Leith, Spectator

Split Personalities

Andrew McConnell Stott, Lapham’s Quarterly

Polanyi’s Political Economy

Mark T. Mitchell, Anamnesis

On “Selling” the Church’s Message

David Warren, Essays in Idleness

Making Immigration A Little More Serfy

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is asking that the federal government allocate city-based visas for high-skill immigrants if those immigrants are willing to settle in Detroit. This immigration to the rescue strategy seems like bad fit for Detroit. From 1960-2010, the US foreign-born population increased from 9.7 million to 40 million. At the same time, Detroit’s population fell by over 50 percent. You would think that if immigration was going to save Detroit, it would have happened already.

Ah, you say. Those immigrants were allowed to live in any old part of the country. What if we forced those immigrants to live in particular municipalities? That gets to a problem I have with some right-leaning supporters of expanding immigration. They try to get around objections to their proposals by suggesting rules that inhibit the ability of immigrants to fully participate in American civic life. This leads to Republicans like Kevin McCarthy arguing for amnesty-but-not-citizenship for illegal immigrants. So we would get some immigrants who are bound to the land, and others who are a permanent nonvoting class. And these are the “compromises”. This is why I’m such a big fan of birthright citizenship. It prevents some Chamber of Commerce shill (whether formally employed by the organization or holding elected office and hoping for a post-retirement lobbying job) floating a compromise that involves the creation of a hereditary class that is excluded from the welfare state and citizenship.

One principle we should have in our immigration policy is that those who settle here should be treated as prospective citizens rather than as human raw material for employers or as an alienated client constituency for left-wing organizations. I’m for a limited amnesty, but I’m also for giving the amnestied citizenship. If we are going to invite people to live in America, it should not be our concern whether they live in Detroit, Topeka or Miami. Our immigration policy is going to bring in our future neighbors. Their children will be the classmates of our children. That means that our immigration policy should involve the most speedy and complete integration of immigrants into American civic life. No servant classes here.

Carl’s Rock Songbook

Hello,
First Thoughtsters! One of the things I’ll be carrying over from my blogging
for Postmodern Conservative, now that it’s been incorporated into First
Thoughts, is “Carl’s Rock Songbook.”

What
is the Rock Songbook?

It
is a series of posts, each of which focuses on a particular rock song, or on a
particular rock-related issue. It has also featured some analyses of relevant
films.

My
favorite posts are those that analyze a song, artist, or style, that I really
love. Here are a few of those:

5.
U2, “New Years Day”6.
Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”7.
Duke Ellington, “Come Sunday,” and The Velvet Underground, “Sunday
Morning”13.
The Ramones, “Bliztkrieg Bop”18.
David Bowie, “The Prettiest Star”23.
The Beach Boys, “That’s Not Me”25.
Simon and Garfunkel, “Sounds of Silence”32.
The Zombies, “A Rose for Emily”34.
The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”40.
The Bangles, “I’m in Line”47.
Surfin’ the You-Tube with the Noise-Pop Beach Goths66.
The Greatness of Dave Gonzalez80.
Joan Baez, “Silver Dagger”84.
The Allah-Las, “Busman’s Holiday”87.
Karen Lafferty, “Seek Ye First”

Once
the First Things web archives get put back into working condition, you’ll be
able to access all of these using the search engine feature above (click on the
magnifying glass icon). So if you’re interested, book-mark this post.

Some
of these songs, you’ll notice, are not really rock songs, although for various
reason discussing them advances my overall project. I don’t regard disco, rap,
jazz, or folk, as being rock, although I have had posts on all of these. Most
controversially, I don’t regard old-time rock n’ roll as being rock. I actually
often attack rock from the standards of both “above” (classical, jazz) and
“below” (rock n’ roll, etc.). However, I do admit that rock is often better
able to capture the modern democratic/middle-class zeitgeist than any
other art-form.

There
are also songbook posts that deal with rock criticism. There are a number that
discuss my debt to Martha Bayles, probably our greatest pop music critic. One
of my series of posts considered Retromania by the rock critic Simon
Reynolds. He gets us thinking about the issue of “recyclement,” that is, the
contemporary pattern of returning to, while slightly reconfiguring, older rock
styles:

48.
Critical Notes on the Indie Rock Noise-Pop Boom49. Simon
Reynolds, Retromania50.
When the Future’s Over, Turn out the Lights51.
Simon Reyonlds and Kurt Andersen on Our Cultural Cul-de-Sac52.
Rock’s Recyclement Explained

Other
series deal with themes that run through rock, sometimes linked to a particular
style. Lately, I’ve returned to a series that deals with the hippie creed of
love:

72.
The Beatles, “It’s Only Love”73.
The Beatles, “All You Need Is Love”88.
Jefferson Airplane, “Let’s Get Together”89.
The Love-World of Jefferson’s First LP

My
first Songbook posts for First Thoughts will develop this further—look for a
post on Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” soon.

******************************************************************************

Like
most all of the Postmodern Conservative writers, as Peter Lawler described
below, I am a Strauss-influenced thinker, but one grounded in Biblical religion. I am an evangelical Protestant, presently attending
an Anglican church. As a scholar, I am a
Great Books generalist, with particular expertise in Tocqueville, Plato, and American
Political Thought.

Now
obviously when younger I had a more intensive-than-average enthusiasm for rock
music, culminating in a stint as a college-radio DJ. But why would a
middle-aged Gen-X-er like me be returning to that now, particularly when his
own musical diet consists far more of classical, jazz,and roots-music? And why would a person blessed with a Great
Books education be making such a big intellectual deal about rock?

Allan
Bloom in 1987 sniffed about the fact that that talking about it [rock music]
with infinite seriousness has become perfectly respectable.
Wasn’t he right to oppose this?

Well,
my seriousness about it is of a finite sort, but I nonetheless think my
Songbook is a worthy and important project, a step forward in the critical
understanding of popular music, and particularly in the way social
conservatives understand it. I eventually will make a book out of it.

The
basic reason pop music matters was long ago expressed in this famous saying of
Plato’s: for never are the ways of
music changed without the greatest of political laws being changed. In
essence, for Plato, a change in the music heralds a change in the regime;
and we must note that for him, regime stands for both a society’s set
of institutions and laws, and its overall way of life.

Our
society, curiously, is one that has experienced a revolution in its cultural
order, but not necessarily in its politics. There was a Cultural Revolution
that occurred in the 1960s. That fact has to be faced. Its most obvious impact
then and to this day has been in the area of sexual mores, but everyone knows
that this happened in tandem with a musical revolution. Pop music in
general became regarded much more seriously than it had been before, and
something that had been called rock n’ roll began to be called Rock. Indeed, so
many fascinating musical changes occurred that anyone with good taste in pop
music has some love for the music of those years, 1964-1969, and the rock stars
of those days have entered into a kind of pantheon. We speak with all
seriousness, because we are really forced to, of a Rock Mythology. The legends
about Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison matter to us as much as those about Achilles
did to the ancient Greeks.

However,
while we correctly speak of a Cultural Revolution, one that began in the
60s and whose full implications and regularization occurred over the course of
the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we also correctly speak of an ongoing Culture War
or Cultural Divide. We note that the U.S. Constitution, a rather
key part of the American regime, remains the law of the land; we note that
Christianity remains the dominant religion of the land, and shows few
unambiguous signs of fading away; we note that efforts to at least try to
practice monogamous marriage continue to characterize the behavior of more adults
than not, despite the heavy blows the institution has suffered. We finally note
the presence, strikingly absent in much of Europe, of a powerful conservative
movement.

In
sum, we have experienced a Cultural Revolution, but at least in America, this
Revolution has not decisively won the day, or somehow cannot win it. The regime
remains divided. To use the sort of symbolic imagery Plato would, our polis
seems to have two citadels rather than one, and only one of these has been
seized by the revolutionaries. And to some extent most of our own souls,
whatever side of the culture divide we might place ourselves on, are divided as
well.

So
in a way, my basic reason for why rock music culture matters is
identical to my suggestion of how to understand it. We need to
study it most of all in an effort to understand our culture, a basic aspect of
which is the ongoing effort to revolutionize it that began in the 60s. Rock
Song is both a cause and a signpost of changes that have occurred, of changes
which did not fully occur but remain very much on the table; even more
interestingly, it is likewise a record of how certain changes did not turn out
the way we expected, and what our emotional reactions have been to the new
world created by the Revolution.

As
a social conservative, I have a general (but not at all comprehensive) tendency
to oppose the changes brought by Revolution, and am thus particularly
interested in pointing out ways in which the creeds of the 60s, so often
embodied in rock song, have come up short. Part of my motivation for doing this
with the help of rock song is that it allows me to give the positions I oppose
a poetic power they wouldn’t otherwise have, and it allows me to show how
certain general ideas have political and philosophic implications.

And
religious implications, too. I am quite serious about the need to approach Rock
as a mythological phenomenon; that is, Rock Song to some extent is a poetic
storehouse of our times, containing a set of symbolic images, phrases, sounds,
and heroes that can be employed, as Socrates employed quotations from Homer, or
as St. Paul employed ones from other Greek poets, to more vividly illustrate
the truly fundamental issues.

Here
are some Songbook entries about songs, artists, or styles I do not particularly
like or recommend, but which I regard as keys to understanding our culture:

1.
The Zombies, “Time of the Season”8.
Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”12.
The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”21.
David Bowie, “Sunday”31.
The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby”41.
The Cramps, “Goo-Goo Muck”58.
Revolution’s Rush—Oliver Stone’s The Doors

So,
my fellow First Thoughts readers and writers, I hope you can see how my project
fits into the overall mission of First
Things. Know that I am at least aware of the dangers of neglecting the Fine
for the Popular, and of the dangers of exposing oneself to the temptations of
the World even as one seeks to better understand them. Still, I don’t need to tell
readers of First Things that arriving
at a truly Christian stance towards our culture, and at strategies for making
it more Christ-seeded, cannot occur without a serious and open-minded
consideration of its main tendencies.

Upcoming Events Roundup — 1.23.14

Two events in the coming days, one in New York and one in Texas:

On February 27th in Waco, Texas, the Baylor Society for Early Christianity will host Peter Leithart for a lecture and panel discussion titled “Defending Constantine.” More information here.

And tomorrow, January 25th, at NYU’s Catholic Center, Anthony Esolen will give a lecture titled “Love and Artistic Genesis.” The lecture starts at 7:30, but based on the number of people who have attended past “Art of the Beautiful” events, I recommend arriving ten or fifteen minutes early. 

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Too Christian to Excite the Left, Too Foreign to Excite the Right

Here’s a great piece by the Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty on the persecution of Mideast Christians. Doughtery offers an explanation for why the human rights community in the West is largely ignoring the problem:

Western activists and media have focused considerable outrage at Russia’s laws against “homosexual propaganda” in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It would only seem fitting that Westerners would also protest (or at the very least notice) laws that punish people with death for converting to Christianity.

And yet the Western world is largely ignorant of or untroubled by programmatic violence against Christians. Ed West, citing the French philosopher Regis Debray, distils the problem thusly: “The victims are ‘too Christian’ to excite the Left, and ‘too foreign’ to excite the Right.”

That really says it quite well.

Hygienic Relics

NPR reports that a Swiss company is one of several firms offering the bereaved the chance to transform their loved ones’ ashen remains into diamonds as postmortem keepsakes. In three months’ time, using the standard industrial techniques to create synthetic diamonds, the company will turn a loved one’s ashes into gems—up to nine of them per body. Some clients have been known to set the diamonds as jewelry. Gems are decidedly more beautiful than ashes, after all, most of them sparkling with a blue tint owing to the minute amount of boron in human bones.

These tokens might be described as a loved one’s “relics,” but the similarity that suggests to older practices isn’t as strong as we might think. Diamonds have a certain hygienic quality to them besides being indestructible and perdurant—two qualities we wish upon mortal life. And it is precisely that wishing, that refusal to face facts, that is the problem.

Europe’s bone churches and sometimes ghoulish reliquaries remind us of an age that considered it wise to face death head-on. Catherine of Siena’s mother was surely twisted inside when she witnessed her daughter’s detached head processed in reliquary through the narrow streets of her Tuscan hometown, held aloft by her spiritual director in a dense procession of devotees. But death they confronted—no evasions here. Her head remains in its gilded case in the Dominican church in Siena, her wrinkled, blackened right thumb encased in a reliquary nearby.

Relics transmit their value by pointing to what was once present but isn’t whole anymore; their grotesquery renders clear the frailty of saints, their unaltered decay pointing to the eventual resurrection of the dead. Catherine’s reliquary has yet to be retouched for appearances; it’s entirely unsanitized and certainly not a gem, but in a way still fits with the Italian axiom for decorum—bella figura.

Ashes becoming diamonds recalls a new, perhaps pagan, form of re-enchantment—the kind that used to haunt Christendom and addle reformers. Charles Taylor described it as an era where “meanings are not only in minds, but can reside in things, or in various kinds of extra-human but intra-cosmic subjects.” Relics were paradigm cases of power residing in things. But while Christianity has not moved entirely away from relics, it has sharpened the distinction between the material and the spiritual, ensuring relics of the deceased are not thought to be magic objects—or jewels.

First Links — 1.24.14

Monks at the Maidan

Pravoslavie.ru

The Surprising Discovery About Colonial Missionaries

Andrea Palpant Dilley,
Christianity Today

The Allure of the Map

Casey N. Cep,
New Yorker

Goodbye, Theory

David Winters,
Los Angeles Review of Books

Lucien Freud: Terrible Father, Great Painter

Vladislav Davidzon,
Tablet