Americana: From "Jack and Diane" to "American Kids"

Very few people would qualify this as Americana and that is their loss for this is not only Americana, it's about as good as Americana gets. Sometimes "Americana" can feel like the genre for people who love country music but hate its fans.

Which brings me to John Mellencamp. If you were alive in the 1980s you will remember that he became the lightning rod for music fans who loved traditional American music but hated traditional America. Ironically, he was seen as an inauthentic Bruce Springsteen wannabee. Why is that ironic? This is why: “Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something about which he has had absolutely no personal experience,” Bruce Springsteen. Mellencamp, on the other hand, was the real thing and he wrote about a life he had real experience of such as, "A little ditty about Jack and Diane, two American kids growin' up in the heartland."

Later, Mellencamp would claim that the song was really about an inter-racial couple. That might be true but I don't believe it. I think that was what he said when he finally gained some respect from the cool kids who used to hate him. Ultimately, it doesn't matter because a song only succeeds to the extent that you can apply it to your life. That means both people in the interracial couple and the same race couple have to be able to imagine its about them.

Or, to be more accurate, that it is about the person they used to be because the whole thing is hindsight. It's about having grown up too fast.

Which brings me to Kenny Chesney, who was 14 years old the summer Jack and Diane was on top. You couldn't avoid it that summer. Chesney  didn't write "American Kids" but it speaks to that experience. It's a song that says, we were that generation and we turned out okay. Which generation exactly? It probably doesn't matter. Any generation from back then.

There are two John Mellencamp shout-outs in the song. There is the title and the line, "Growin' up in little pink houses, makin' out on living room couches." Kant famously said that he understood Plato better than Plato understood himself, Chesney can make the same claim about Mellencamp.

Americana: Gentle on My Mind

John Hartford was born in New York City. You might be forgiven for thinking otherwise after watching that video. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, though, and says his musical tastes where formed by listening to Earl Scruggs.

Through a series of connections that I won't bother making that brings up the thorny issue of origins. There is a whole lot that might be said but I think the important thing is this: neither Earl Scruggs nor John Hartford were folk musicians although both are folky.

For the record, I think folk is all fakesong. There is no such thing. Fake or not, tough, there are people who think they are folk. Not Hartford; there is something, well, something what? It's not authenticity. Everything about that performance is scripted, including the folksiness. It starts with the dialogue, as if they hadn't decided what song to do next.

Hartford wrote "Gentle on my mind" after seeing Dr. Zhivago. He said it wasn't anything particular about the movie. It just gave him a feeling and he wrote the song. He was asked about the song over and over again for the rest of his life and, God bless him, was always gracious about answering questions he must have heard a hundred times before. In one of those turns he said the movie gave him a "lonesome, traveling feeling".

That was a rather convenient thing for a man about to write a bluegrass song to have for lonesome feelings is something bluegrass is rather good at.

But there is something new too. Something you can hear in these lines,

And it's knowing I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that are dried upon some line

Whoever she  was, she gave him sex without marriage. Not just once but lots of it. But he's long gone now. And no matter how bluegrass "Gentle on my mind" is, Bill Monroe wouldn't have sung that.

The important thing about the song is that it's not a song about the woman. It's a male fantasy. Not a sex fantasy, although there is sex in it. There are a lot of songs like that. The thing that tells you it's fantasy is the line about the sleeping bag stashed behind your couch. What, she doesn't have a bed?



Funny thing about it, and my last thought for today, is that the song works better when women sing it. There is an interesting challenge when a woman sings a song written for a man or vice versa. The challenge is how much do you reverse? Consider these four lines:

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother
'Cause she turned and I was gone

The obvious thing to do is to change the last two lines to,

And some other man is cryin' to his mother
'Cause he turned and I was gone 

Krauss doesn't do that even though she fully assumes the narrator's role in the song. The temptation is to say it's morally more acceptable because it's no longer some guy bragging about all the women he's had along the road but I don't think that works. It's something else. The song is still a male fantasy that Krauss validates by assuring us she remembers us fondly even though ... . The important thing about the song is that it's about an experience, an American experience. And that is where Americana starts.

Americana: Why not Canadiana?

A fairly obvious question, and therefore one I should deal with sooner or later, is why I, a Canadian, am so interested in Americana? Why not Canadiana? There is a such a word, although it doesn't have much "content". The Wikipedia entry on the subject is just a stub.

The short answer is simply that, like most Canadians, I've always found Americana much more interesting.  The longer answer is more complicated.

A good place to start the longer answer is to point at an column by David Solway called "Canada: A Dead Country Walking". It's an incoherent little piece in that it begins by saying that Canada never really has had a core identity and then concludes that bad people are tearing apart that core identity; you know, the one that doesn't actually exist in the first place. And then Solway goes on to laud Pierre Trudeau for having invoked the War Measures Act to crush a terrorist movement in 1970s, lamenting that Pierre's son Justin, "has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble." And that tells you a lot—that Pierre Trudeau gets lauded as a great defender of a national identity that doesn't exist because he used brutal and dictatorial methods to do so. That, my friends, is what insecurity looks like.

Twenty-four years ago, then Premier of Quebec Lucien Bouchard stirred up a hornet's nest in the rest of Canada by saying, “Canada is divisible because Canada is not a real country.” The anger wasn't at the "divisible" part of the claim. Very few Canadians even noted it at the time and even those who remember the incident now tend to misquote Bouchard, thinking that he only said "Canada is not a real country." And it takes very little effort to understand why—and Solway makes the point at some length—Canada is divisible in a way that the USA is not. The point neither he nor anyone else seems to be able to make is why it should not be.

Ultimately, of course, the USA is divisible. Any country can be dismembered and that is probably the inevitable fate of all countries eventually. The problem with Canada is that there is nothing approaching the sort of argument Lincoln made for the union in Canada's case. Lincoln could, and did, argue that breaking up the union would have meant the destruction of a founding idea, conceived in Liberty, that all men are created equal. Canada was created as an exercise of power and, in the end, whether Canada holds together is a simple question of power.

More than that, the USA was created by people who understood that power was a problem. They understood that power dispensed to a bureaucracy to administer a law such as the Stamp Act would create a faction that had an active interest in destroying liberty for that faction's continued existence would defend absolutely not only on its holding onto to that power but on the continual extension of that power. Sir John A. Macdonald, on the other hand, pursued confederation precisely so he could get his hands on that power—the control of patronage appointments. That, and not any identity or any set of beliefs about the dignity of human beings created by God, is the principle upon which Canada is founded. There were people who had different ideas about what Canada might be founded on but it was Macdonald and his lust for power that won out.

As Solway grudgingly notes, there is a Québecois identity. It's an identity whose future is uncertain but it exists and if one wanted to put together a list of "Quebecana" it would be ridiculously easy to do. You could do likewise with Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Alberta albeit in a way that would seem piddle compared to the rich cultural identity of the USA and Quebec. You should be able to do it with Ontario, New Brunswick and British Columbia, although in an even more reduced form, because most residents of those provinces have been taught to hate the their cultural heritage.

And here's the really telling thing: the USA is a much more diverse country, culturally speaking, than Canada is. The claim I'm making here is not that Canada isn't diverse but rather that diversity pales compared to what you see in the USA.

There is a sense in which Bouchard's claim is ludicrous. Of course Canada is a real country. The problem arises when you start to find something real beyond the fact that it's a government that has a country. If you go looking for Canadiana, you'll find some, but it's pretty thin gruel.

My Americana

This is the only Lyle Lovett song I listen to much anymore.



That's not particularly notable for anyone but me.

I used to listen to Lyle all the time. In the late 1980s he was my guy. In retrospect, it isn't hard to figure out why.

I grew up in New Brunswick. The local radio station played rock and roll for only two hours a day—between 8 and 10 pm. And that was only six days a week. On Sunday night we got Billy Graham from 8 til 9 and no rock music at all. The rest of the time they played country.

I loved rock and roll at the time. Every Sunday I'd go through the same deception. I'd get into my bedroom and pull out my Holiday 8 Transistor radio and turn it on expecting the music I craved and get Billy Graham instead. Here's the thing, though, I never turned off Billy Graham. And every year I'd watch the Daytona 500. I was a hard core Richard Petty fan. And I listened to the country music that played all the time. I loved Buck Owens.

I had good instincts as a kid. Later, when I was in Ottawa to go to university, I listened to the music all my friends professed to like—mostly David Bowie, Roxy Music, Talking Heads, B52s and The Clash—but I also loved the music I grew up on. There was rock music that was partly or largely disguised country music such as the Rolling Stones, The Band and John Mellencamp. There was also country music it was respectable to like: I had a copy of Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music which all my friends at least tolerated; to do otherwise would have been "raaaacist". The same album by a white artist they would have despised.

And then came Lyle. The great thing about Lyle was the irony. It was country but it really wasn't. His tongue was always in his cheek. And I loved that.

Only I can't listen to it much anymore. The song above is an exception. There is no irony in it. It tells a story that a lot of men (and not a few women) can identify with. What it feels like when the woman you love and who still loves you wants out and nothing is going to change her mind. It's a straightforward story this song tells. It's not simple—a lot of artistry went into this song. But a lot of artistry went into almost everything Lyle did. For me, in any case, most of what he did hasn't aged well.

Joshua Judges Ruth, the album this song came from was the last Lyle Lovett album I ever bought. I didn't consciously reject him. He just no longer captured my imagination after that. It was just time to move on.

I said at the top that it isn't hard to figure out why Lyle was my guy. The reason is that he gave me an excuse to love the music I had always loved but was ashamed to admit in front of the cool kids. Lyle was not-really-but-kinda-sorta country. Over time, it was precisely that irony that became troublesome. Looking back, it's interesting (for me) to notice that I started to get tired of the irony in the early 1990s—that is to say years before 9/11.

And I can understand why that happened. I had just gotten out of a relationship that had been about fun but, as so often happens, had come to be love. And there are few things more damaging to the soul than to fall deeply in love with the wrong woman. I got out of that and into a relationship with a woman who valued the same things I did. One of the ironies (in the historical sense of the word this time) was that the friend who invited me to the occasion where I met Amy had done so with some trepidation because she worried that Amy and I would hate one another. Nora figured that I'd fit in with everyone else who'd be present but was worried that Amy and I would immediately clash and ruin everything for everyone. It didn't happen.

It was my fault that Nora thought that. I'd been lying about myself for years. Not surprisingly, my friends had started to believe my lies because, no matter how odious the source for this maxim, it is true that a lie constantly repeated tends to get accepted. Even by me. After 12 years of lying to myself and everyone else about who I was, I was finally ready to be honest.

Anyway, enough rambling. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts about Americana because Americana played a huge role in defining me. That's a troublesome statement because neither term—both "Americana" and "me"—is terribly well defined. I don't expect anyone else to care about me but others might be interested in the Americana issue.

Priorities

Half a century ago, a certain social set really had its priorities in order. Life’s pursuits ran something like this: Jazz, tennis, newspapers, Yankees vs. Red Socks, Newport and Nantucket, sailing, contemporary literature, prize fights, prep schools and the Ivy League, cigarettes and cocktails, college football, Broadway shows, and New York parties that blended socialites with beatniks.

That's from a tribute to the Andover Shop's Charlie Davidson, who died this past Monday. I grew up in New Brunswick in a family whose roots were Québecois and famine Irish and yet that list largely describes the values my father and mother sought to instill in me. Prep schools were out of our financial reach, although a number of my aunts and uncles had made it to Ivy League schools (on scholarships) and were endlessly praised for having done so. Broadway shows were admired although we didn't get a chance to see them and had to wait for film adaptations. Parties that blended socialites with beatniks were more a subject for humor than admiration. But the rest of it: jazz, tennis, newspapers, Newport and Nantucket, sailing, contemporary literature, prize fights, cigarettes and cocktails and college football was endorsed. To which should be added: the style of dress Charlie Davidson and the Andover shop promoted.

None of those things were verbally endorsed! No one ever sat us down and said, these are the things you should value. We were taught by example. My father was a Hi Fi buff and the records he bought were jazz records. They all played tennis and when we visited cousins, tennis was always one of the activities. We had a sailing club membership and a racing dinghy and no one complained when I spent hours sailing or playing tennis. There were modern novels on the bookshelves and there were bookshelves in every room of the house. Men talked about the prize fights and every single adult male in the family had some experience in the ring. Cigarettes and cocktails were a prominent part of my parents entertaining. And we went to college football games.

And yet, it was all slipping away as I grew up.

Prize fights had already started to lose their luster before I started Grade 1. For most men of my father's generation, the second Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston fight stunk horribly. It was to them what the Epstein "suicide" is to men in their twenties and thirties today. Even if it wasn't actually fixed, everything about it left a bad taste.

The next things to go were jazz and Broadway shows. There were still jazz records my father had purchased in the 1950s and 1960s in the house when I hit my teen years but I was the only one who still listened to them. I remember my mother going to New York in 1977 and coming back with the report that the only one of the new shows she had liked was Annie. She was so disappointed, she never went back again.

Cigarettes and cocktails tapered out. By the early 1970s, any adult who still smoked did so shamefully. Cocktails were still consumed but less and less effort was put into preparing them. Women drank Bloody Marys and G&Ts. Men increasingly just drank scotch. The elegant glasses they were served in and the equally elegant clothes people put on to socialize slowly disappeared. Only a few men even bothered to have special glasses for their scotch.

Literature ebbed away without anyone acknowledging it. I remember visiting family friends in the late 1970s. While the adults talked, I slipped away into the library of the house and found my sister already there. She'd noticed something interesting. Our hosts had purchased every single Pulitzer, Booker and Nobel prize winning novel since some time early 1970s. That they had shifted from actively taking an interest in literary culture to reading only prize-winning books was significant in itself. What my sister had noticed, though, was that all of the books had stiff spines and a book mark somewhere in the first third. These books had been purchased out of a sense of duty and never finished.

Attitudes towards newspapers followed a similar pattern. Instead of reading the whole paper, my parents only read a few favourite columnists.

Tennis and sailing were done in by technology. Never cheap sports, they became ridiculously expensive. One-design racing boats became as expensive as cruising class, so people bought larger boats they could drink beer on or just stopped sailing altogether. Both sports were now administered by government-funded organizations instead of volunteer bodies and these tended to emphasize the interest of elite athletes and cared little or not all for ordinary people who played out of love.

College sports still mattered until the 1980s. But then it became political. It used to be that fans of rival schools could sit in the same room and put down one another's schools and teams in  good-natured way. By 1990, there were people who regarded Duke university as the moral equivalent of the Klan.

For young men my age, that culture that was ebbing away was not our culture. We'd grown up on Led Zeppelin, shopping malls and television. And yet it wasn't our parents culture anymore either. It was something they had abandoned and some of us resented their having done so. When it came time to leave childish things behind, which, for me, was sometime in the 1980s, a lot of us gravitated towards the things our fathers had loved in the 1950s.

Thansgiving

My vote for the most deliciously transgressive moment in the entire YA canon:

Her eyes sparkled with the joy of youth and it was easy for her to smile. She was an only child, the daughter of Anthony Parker, editor and publisher of the Riverview Star, and her mother had died when she was very young.

She is Penny Parker created by Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson. The sentences don't quite say that it's easy for her to smile because her mother had died when she was very young but they walk right up to the edge of the thought and urge you to finish it for yourself. Killing off parents is an old practice in YA literature. Even when they are not outright killed, they are usually gotten offstage as quickly as possible. Benson, however, killed off mothers with a vengeance. She created four YA series—Nancy Drew, Penny Parker, Madge Sterling and Ruth Darrow—and in each and every one of them the Heroines mother is dead. To lose one mother might be regarded as misfortune, to lose four begins to look deliberate.

Let the gratitude begin.

Objective truth?

What do I really believe? Shouldn't I just know? No. Our mind doesn't work that way. We have tod discover our own beliefs just as e discover the beliefs of others. Often we only think we believe what are really a set of tribal  beliefs we pick up from others around us.

And then we read something that sticks in our mental esophagus and refuses to budge:

These films portray fundamental conservative values that make America great. They promote liberty, objective truth, family, patriotism, and the recognition that evil exists and must be fought.

I understand how people come to say and believe those things.  That said, I think there are mistakes in that position.

Conservatism vs liberalism

The first is that it is fundamental liberal values or, more accurately, an outgrowth of Whig values that made America great. American conservatism is a recent phenomena.

The problem is that both "liberalism" and "conservatism" are a slippery concepts. I was just reading an essay of Ronald Dworkin's from 1978 in which he discussed a new kind of liberalism that he thought was coming into being at that time. what is interesting is not what Dworkin thought was new liberalism in 1978 but what he thought was old liberalism.

Liberals were for greater economic equality, for internationalism, for freedom of speech and against censorship, for greater equality between the races and against segregation, for a sharp separation of church and state, for greater procedural protection for accused criminals, for decriminalization of 'morals' offenses, particularly drug offenses and consensual sexual offenses involving only adults, and for an aggressive use of central government power to achieve all these goals.

To which one can only say, Yikes!

It's telling, if not downright terrifying, that the word "liberty" appears nowhere in that definition. The first value Dworkin lists is "equality" and it shows up again and again in the list. That combined with "internationalism" shows just how successful efforts to quietly infiltrate and subordinate liberalism to socialist goals had been.

The next issue is that modifier "sharp". It should be enough to say, "for separation of church and state." Somewhere along the line that had become using the state to crush religion by shrinking its field of operation to something purely private.

Finally, there is the terrifying, "an aggressive use of central government power to achieve all these goals." There is nothing even vaguely liberal about that. Any real liberal would instantly recognize that as opening the door to incremental authoritarianism and loudly denounce it.

From the late 1950s, when it first came into existence, up until the 1990s, American conservatism was about opposing those pseudo-liberal developments.

"Objective truth"

This, of course, comes from Ayn Rand. It's an attempt to turn the clock back to a time before Kant. Again, it's easy to see why this notion can seem appealing but it's not an American value.

"Evil exists and must be fought"

On level, yes, this is true. But there are real problems with thinking of life as a battle between stark choices of good or evil. There are a whole lot of gradations of good and bad out there.

Confessions

I got it back recently. By "it" I mean my past. By "recently" I mean in the last few years.

I've never thought average guys were compelled to ape the ruling class, I don't believe romance is inevitably corrupted, and the collapse of European culture is long overdue. In short, what Bryan Ferry has to say has never spoken very loud to this listener no matter how you break it down.

That's Robert Christgau from  his review of an early greatest hits collection from Roxy Music. That band was a secret pleasure of mine in the late 1970s. In high school I'd heard "Love is the Drug" on the radio and loved it. I never would have admitted to anyone that I liked them. I bought Bryan Ferry's solo records In Your Mind and Let's Stick Together and somehow ended up in possession of another one called Another Time, Another Place that I hope I didn't steal.

I listened to those records only when there was no one else home. I wouldn't have dared to admit to anyone that I liked them. Even to myself, I affected a slight irony about liking them, always holding something back. Like a lot of boys raised by women, I had come to feel, as Robert Glover aptly put it, that it was "not safe or acceptable for a man or boy to be just who he is." Bryan Ferry provided me (and, I suspect, others) a romantic escape where we could experiment with figuring that out.

During the lowest period of my life, I listened to Flesh + Blood and Avalon obsessively.

Christgau is wrong. The Bryan Ferry thing is not that average guys are compelled to ape the ruling class but that we're allowed to if we want. That may seem to contradict the previous point but I don't think it does.

A selfish question about FaceBook

I stopped reading FaceBook from the 23 of December until the 7 January. I did this for nostalgic reasons. When I was a kid those days were for close friends and family and for God. We cut out distractions and focused on what matters most.

Anyway, it had an unexpected benefit. I suddenly found myself with a whole lot of free time. I was able to get stuff done. More importantly, I was able to get solitude. Solitude matters a lot to me and I have had a hard time getting it lately. I found myself resenting people I should be caring about because they would seek me out when I was craving solitude. That all disappeared when I stopped being on FB.

The problem social media presents me is that I can never get away from it. I feel like I have to be ready to respond to whatever might come up so I worry about what might be happening when I'm away. So I log on to check and that leads to the second problem. FB is designed so as to make it difficult or impossible to rejoin the conversation you had yesterday. It keeps giving you an endless stream of distractions whole burying the stuff you looked at just an hour ago so deep it takes a long time to find it. That isn't an accident; they've intentionally designed the site to function that way.

When I logged in again on January 7, I did so with enthusiasm. I had a whole lot of notifications, many more than I've ever had before. I looked forward to it figuring here are dozens of things that actually will be of interest to me! Well, not so much. There was not a single thing of actual use to me.

Since then, I've taken to logging in on Friday and Monday only and checking only notifications. I don't scroll the feed. And the selfish question I have is this: What's in this for me? I know, what about others. That was the justification I used in the past. I'd think, okay, most of what's here is of no interest to me but it's a way of staying in touch with people I care about; it will give me opportunities to learn about stuff they're doing and to show support. Unfortunately, that didn't work out. People don't self-reveal on FB. What they do is try to co-opt you into things they care about.

And so up crops the selfish question. What does this service offer me? I've been checking before the weekend in case there are things I want to go to. All I get is a bunch of things other people want me to go to. On Monday, I check to see if anything happened that I may want to look into in the future. So far, nothing.

Crypto-Catholic Libertine

A post about coming out.

Here's Isabel from Le divorce again:

I gradually came to understand that Edgar was religious, at least officially, believed in God and the Catholic religion, in a not preoccupied but nonetheless sincere way.

At first I was shocked by this. In California, you wouldn't go out with anyone openly religious, because someone who talks about God automatically comes across as a hypocrite. But there was also the French hypocrisy, if that is the word—or inconsistency is a better one—in believing in a religion and conducting this rather unconcerned adultery.

That "inconsistency" can't be proven. It's not a factual claim. There is sufficient variation within any group that you could easily find Americans who perfectly embody the French attitude and vice versa, pun on "vice" very much intended.

We might say that the Frenchy American would count as an outlier in her culture while the Française à l'americaine would likewise be seen as really French and yet different in hers. I don't know if that holds up; it's just an idea I'm trying out.

It's time for a confession: I lied. Not to you so much as to myself. I've done this twice lately. The first time was on Facebook a year or so ago. A cousin of mine put up a picture of me from my early teen years. I'm not sure exactly how old I was in the picture but probably 15 or younger. It caused much comment among my friends because I had a style in that picture that was very far from what I adopted just a few years later at 18 and have kept more or less, with a few short side excursions, ever since. By way of explanation I said that I identified with Keith Richards in those days. I believed what I wrote on Facebook when I wrote it but it wasn't true. That was brought home to me rather bluntly last summer when I found a box of stuff I had collected as a teenager that had come from my parents' house. What was painfully obvious was that I had actually identified with Mick Jagger. To be blunt, my entire personality was based on my understanding of him.

Why did I lie, first to myself and then to the rest of the world? Mostly shame. And by "shame" I mean I was mostly scared to admit it. Telling the whole world the truth about your aspirational self just opens you up to mockery. Anyway, I said in an earlier post that I identify with Isabel but the truth is I identify with Edgar Cosset.

As a rule I would advise against ever revealing your aspirational self—the sort of character you aspire to develop—except to a few very trusted friends who you think might have useful things to say to you about it. Otherwise, don't talk about the person you want to be just be it. I feel safe breaking my own rule in this case because Edgar is only a type and I can cop to the type. Indeed, it's hardly a secret. Twenty-five years ago the art department of a company I worked for showed me the mock up for my business card for my approval. As a joke, the designer had put "poète et bon vivant" where my title should have gone. I have a type and it's not a secret: my entire office was in on it. Except to me who is sometimes ashamed of something that is not even a secret.

Which brings me to the name of this blog. Back when I started I called it "Crypto-Catholic Libertine". I shied away from that mostly out of fear of what we Catholics call "scandal". I was worried that someone might see it and that the implied hypocrisy in that name, which is not erased by the intended irony, might disturb them. So I ditched what was probably the best name the blog ever had.

Why am I going back to it now? Well, here's the continuation of Isabel's thoughts from above:

I brought up this issue in a rather general was with Mrs. Pace, without mentioning Edgar and me.

"Well, their piety is more evolved," said Mrs. Pace. "In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the wordly."

"The genuine?" I wondered.

"I suppose they are all genuine. Bitterness is always genuine. And there is nothing so fervently genuine as as the sense of being right. Smugness, autrement dit. Why not world but genuine?"

That point about all pieties being genuine is a deep one.

In any case, "Crypto-Catholic Libertine" is back.

On not caring

Contrary to what many people will tell you, two of the most important lessons to learn if you want to be happy are 1) figuring out what not to care about and 2) not caring about those things.

Dealing with ambiguity

Ann Althouse has an interesting post up today on ambiguity.

The source of it is an article in GQ called "How to talk to the women in your life right now." "Right now" meaning after the Kavanaugh hearing. The sentence that caught Althouse's attention is: "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

Ambiguity aside, the intended message is that if your woman friend expresses her rage this way, you shouldn't argue with her. Apparently, women are helpless creatures who can't deal with argument.

I don't know about that but I'll tell you what I would do if a woman friend of mine said something like that. I'd stop being friends with her.

Rude question: What's the difference between a twink and an incel?

I posted about twinks two days ago. Walking my dog later, it struck me that, physically, twinks are very close to incels. The are small men with little muscle or hair. Men who don't look or act manly.




 Troy Sivan is gay but this is a very heterosexual video aimed at teenage girls. His being gay isn't an obstacle because the whole point of this sort of thing was perfectly explained by The Simpsons years ago:

 If you're a teenage girl just starting to think about love, there is no less-threatening choice than a small and weak gay man.




And there is nothing new about this. Here is a song that is widely condemned for it's misogyny. Pay close attention, though, and you'll notice that it's actually a very girly song. The attitude you see on display here is of a teeange girl afraid of getting hurt mentally rehearsing how she's going to deal with a breakup before such a thing is even a possibility.




It's a bitchy song about one girl who is afraid of everything: she's afraid of the boys who really want her and she's afraid of the mean girl who will steal that boy from her. That's the attitude that drives the song. That's why millions of girls bought it back in 1965. Nothing has changed. Don't believe anyone who tries to tell you differently.

"Don Draper sure has a lot of power for a fictional character"

Yes, I'm still on the subject six years later.

The quote in the header is from Ann Powers and the article that follows it doesn't actually give any evidence of Don having any actual power. Other, that is, than the power to really mess with Ann Powers mind.

Powers, as rapidly becomes obvious from her bio, is a geek. The sort of geek who doesn't actually live life but experiences it by proxy through the lives of the superheroes she obsesses about. Her superheroes are not X-men and their not fantasy fiction figures. No, like geeks of my generation, she's five years younger than me, her superheroes are musicians. So when cool-daddy Don didn't get the Beatles, she was thrown into turmoil and had to write about it and prove that he would indeed have gotten the Beatles. Her entire mythology was on the line.

Now it's worth reminding ourselves of the chronology. I was 11 years old when the Beatles broke up and Ann Powers was 6. Like most boomers, neither of us experienced this stuff. It was a  story we were told, not the life we lived. And it was a highly mythologized story right from the beginning. The Beatles were big during the 1960s but they got much bigger in retrospect than they actually were at the time. Think of Donald Trump by way of analogy. He's a big figure in the news right now but what will history think of him? The honest answer is, I don't know. Likewise the Beatles in 1966.

What Ann Powers wants, needs even, is to have her 1960s mythology validated by Don Draper and he won't do it.

I'll return to that, but, for now, let me leave you with a possibly disturbing thought. Here's the concluding paragraph to the Powers piece.

As an inventive, highly competitive trend-chaser, Don Draper would have loved the Beatles from the minute they hit Ed Sullivan. Besides, we already know he's scored tickets to the band's 1965 Shea Stadium concert for his daughter Sally. A more likely response: he would have pulled Revolver out of Megan's manicured grip and said, "Honey, you stick with the crazy stuff, I'm a big fan of 'Paperback Writer!'" Heck, he probably would have used Lane to get a lunch with Brian Epstein. The "meh" he tossed "Tomorrow Never Knows" was just not believable. Now, if Megan had left him with a copy of the Sylvia Plath poem that gave the episode its name — that might have actually shocked him into silence.

That is her mythology on full display. Notice the sudden shift at the very end where Sylvia Plath comes up. Now that is interesting. The poem is indeed disturbing. It's the work of a genius but a very troubled genius. To be blunt, "troubled" here means manipulative, self-destructive and a high-maintenance nightmare. Like the Beatles, Plath is a cultural icon whom many people have idolized. Read the poem, though, and ask yourself what it must have been like to have been married to a woman like that.

Don Draper is a flawed character but he is the hero of this story. At this moment he is in his second bad marriage. One way you might describe his quandary is that he keeps trying to live according to a script. Here, his script has been upset by another script, Megan's script that life should be lived according to the demands of art. She isn't so crazy as Plath was but there is a parallel.

One of those moments

My beard, once black has gone increasingly white over the years. It was salt and pepper two years ago but now is almost entirely white except in the sideburns. I really like it in its new, white garb. Last weekend I saw an old friend, one of those people whom you stop seeing and sometimes wonder why you don't see them anymore. On seeing me, his first remark was, "Wow, your beard has really gone white!" And I replied, "Yeah, isn't it great!" In response to which he got a hurt look on his face.

I guess that's why I don't see him much anymore.

If you only read one thing today ...

... let this be it:

You are not bad.

You are not broken.

You are not inherently evil or a sexual abuser in waiting.

You are boys who were robbed of your right to be men.

All your life you’ve been told to act, think, and behave like women. To suppress your passions, your pride, your need to compete and drive to achieve.

Now society is crumbling around us.

Feminizing boys didn’t make better men. It’s resulted in broken homes and shattered families and record suicide rates. It’s destroying any notion of a healthy partnership between men and women, and is pushing us ever closer to total collapse of gender relations.

David Brooks versus Jordan Peterson (2)

I'm pretty certain Jordan Peterson is a liberal. That doesn't mean much. What is liberal is pretty fluid and yesterday's mainstream liberal stance often turns out to be today's hate speech. Which is pretty much what happened when Peterson took a stance against legally enforced speech.

It is not for that reason alone that Peterson is liked on the right. He also advocates what David Brooks, discussed in a previous post, calls "strength of will, the bootstrap, the calls to toughness and self-respect" [NB: New York Times link] and that is a conservative attitude today. It wasn't always. It used to be liberals who advocated that approach with conservatives taking more of a noblesse oblige attitude. Sir Winston Churchill's father Randolph and Winston himself, especially in his younger days, took such a stand.

Liberalism had begun to shift to a more paternalistic rather than individualistic tone by 1870 but the larger shift didn't happen until the 1930s when the Democrats in the USA and the Labour Party in Britain began actively seeking the votes of poorer people. Before that the Republicans and the Liberal Party in Britain had been the parties representing the oppressed but they had done so from the perspective of those looking down.

It's important to stop and consider the irony. Politics became more paternalistic in form as it became less paternalistic in attitude. You could not find a movement more paternalistic that modern progressivism.

The truth is that people don't always want what is best for them. Just out of university I was deeply in debt. What I wanted was for my debts to be forgiven. No one was willing to do that so I paid them off instead. And thank God I did. The self-discipline I learned in those days has turned out to be worth many times more than what the dollar value of forgiving the loans would have been.

I doubt I would have seen this at the time. No one offered to forgive my debts but if someone had shown up and said, "Let me help you out, here's a cheque for the full amount," I would have jumped at it. It was only when I realized I had no choice but to work hard to get out of the situation I was in and, more importantly, started to actually work hard, that I realized the advantages of bootstrapping. Which brings me back to David Brooks. He describes the call to "strength of will, the bootstrap, the calls to toughness and self-respect" as a need that young men have. As a "need". That's a telling word choice.

David Brooks is more of an old-fashioned conservative, driven by a paternalistic noblesse oblige. He does identify with or much like the people he'd like to help out. You can feel the disdain when he describes what he imagines to be the their situation: "constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt." It never occurs to Brooks that these men might be motivated by what Petsreon says because they have already begun to grasp that hard work and sacrifice works whereas what people like Brooks say, that " he lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice," is foolish paternalistic nonsense.

Lupercalia

Today, is the Feast of the Presentation of The Lord for Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and some Lutherans. It is also known as Candlemas and, more importantly for this discussion, "The purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary". Why did she need purification? Because the antique Jewish faith required purification anytime you touched blood or semen and Mary had given birth some forty days before. Forty was a number that signified completion. We will shortly begin forty days of Lent for our purification.

 

At the same time, this is one of many Christian feasts that were intended to replace a pre-existing pagan feast, so the Roman feast of purification Februa/Lupercallia, becomes the Purification of Mary. As a believing Catholic and a married man fond of ritual and domesticity, I still can’t help feeling that something has been lost here, that swapping a warlike Juno for meek little Mary, and that’s the the way we celebrate her today, was a bad deal. 

 

The photo at the top is a piece of driftwood from Pocologan, New Brunswick. I think it looks like, or can be seen as if you prefer, a pagan wolf.

A clarifying moment

I had a very revealing conversation recently. In the midst of it one of the two people I was talking with apologized for being shallow. I rushed in to assure her that she was not shallow. Turned out her apology was ironic. This was clear to her and the the other woman in the conversation but not to me. The conversation, I should add, took place on line and there were no emojis attached to her statement. She just said what she said and felt that it should have been obvious that she was being ironic and the fact that her friend also grasped this is proof that she's not crazy. She said something that she and another person took as a sane, rational thing to say.

What she said was that she had watched a particular video at the surface level. She acknowledged that the surface meaning was incoherent but she liked that surface meaning and wanted to stay at that level. This followed by "I guess I'm a shallow person." I was supposed to understand that this was not an actual apology.

I know what your thinking: isn't staying on the surface another way of saying "shallow"?

That doesn't make her shallow. Well, not immediately anyway. 

It's a funny way of thinking though. I don't think it's her fault. It's just the way two generations have been brought up now. I remember noticing it first in the 1980s when I was working with teenagers. There was a funny transition where kids stopped being able to take criticism because they personalized. To admit they had done a bad thing was the same thing as being a bad person. As a consequence, you couldn't criticize their actions without wounding them deeply. I think you see the same dynamic at work here—it is impossible to recognize shallow behaviour for what it is because that reasonable judgment is taken as condemnation of the entire person which would not be reasonable.

Is God is telling you to man up?

A friend of mine shared this on Facebook this morning.

I know why he posted it. It's a joke and we're supposed to laugh and that laughter is supposed to give us some relief. But maybe life is tough because you're supposed to be a man, because you can, in fact, handle it if only you;d make a serious commitment to be the bad-ass man he means you to be.