"... authenticity has travelled so far from its roots that it has become its opposite ...

"The notion of authenticity that emerged during the Enlightenment was a ‘close twin’ of moral autonomy. To think and act for oneself, and therefore to develop a truer, more authentic expression of the self, required one to be independent of the judgement of others. But in its modern, politicised form, authenticity has been institutionalised as a ‘social aspiration’ – something that people are expected to cultivate, and which therefore depends on validation by others. ‘[T]his new form of dependency, generated by the ethic of authenticity, has another name: narcissism’,"

That's from an interesting piece at Spiked.

“Authenticity” has long troubled me. Once upon a time I thought the concept morally useless. I'd no longer say that. I think that it has a place but that it is of limited use. It is one of a number of concepts—purity, sincerity and truth are other examples—that seem terribly important for morality but turn out to do very little real work.

Or, to put another way, I suspect the contention that authenticity has traveled so far from what it was originally meant to mean that it now means something like its opposite is true but the real problem was trying to make too much of the concept in the first place. It's a perfect example of Wittgenstein's dictum that you cannot pack more meaning into a word just as you cannot make a teacup hold more than a teacup-full by pouring a gallon of water over it.

“The feeling increasingly is that experts and the media are all part of this elite class ...

" ... that is self-dealing and is looking down on less-educated and less-fortunate people, and [that] they can’t be trusted to tell the truth.” He adds, “That dynamic … has been reinforced” by the emergence of the “conservative media ecosystem,” which unstintingly presents “elites” as a threat to viewers."

I'll plead guilty on that. That's exactly what I believe. The only thing I'd add is that many of these elites are not particularly elite.

This week, the state broadcaster, CBC, published a piece about how to communicate about COVID-19 on social media without causing panic. That is stunning in its lack of self-awareness.

The local test centre is at the Brewer Arena that is a half-block from my house. Access to the arena is through Bronson Avenue but you can also cut through my neighbourhood to get there. There are barriers set up at the end of my street to stop people from doing that. As I walked t he god this morning I watched a man drive around the barrier and park and walk over to the arena. I looked him right in the eyes and he guiltily looked away.

This sort of thing makes me angry. It's easy to follow the rules, just do it unless there is a damn good reason not to. Your personal convenience  is not a damn good reason. If you live in a government city like Ottawa, you get to seeing this sort of abuse. The very people who spend their days thinking of new ways to regulate other people's lives, cheerfully ignore or circumvent regulations because they're special or something.

All my life I've angered people I know with my lacking of respect for authorities. That lack of respect pisses them off. I think we need a lot less respect for authority and a lot more respect for rules.

Self Reliance

I am preparing a seminar on Thomas Aquinas for this afternoon. I decided that I would scandalize my fellow Catholics by, approvingly, quoting Emerson. (This is not the first time I do this.) I love Emerson.

The following is not the quote I plan to use. It's just an old favourite that I noticed because it's underlined with an exclamation point beside it in my copy.

Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done in apology or extenuation of their living in the world,—as invalids and the insane pay high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself, and not for spectacle.

For four of five generations before me, every boy educated in the Northeast read that essay. They read it. They were called upon to read it aloud at public gatherings. And they were made to write precis and responses to it. It was in my high school reader but my teachers hated it and only called attention to it to tell us how horrible they thought it was. By the end of the 1970s it had disappeared from textbooks.

It's a shame because it's very good advice. Virtue is about becoming the person you want to be. And live your virtues, don't talk about them. That means DON'T EXPLAIN THEM! Yes, you might discuss them quietly with a trusted friend whom you can be vulnerable with to see how well they hold up. Otherwise, just live them.

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.

Americana: Bernie Sanders

At this point, I don't how the Democratic Party establishment can respond to Bernie without committing suicide. There are one hell of a lot of young idealists lining up for Bernie. I doubt very much that the majority of young people (A term that nowadays means people under 35) have much desire for Bernie. There are a core of young people who deeply believe and a lot more who are swept up in the moment. But, however shallow Bernie's support may be, if he doesn't win it will unleash an astonishing bitterness towards the party.

But let's leave that aside and ask how those of us who aren't in the roughly 25% of the population that forms the core of Democrat support should respond. One possibility that I see a lot on the right is to brand Bernie as a socialist and, therefore, not really American. And I can see why; it seems like a no-brainer. Bernie has declared support for socialism in the past and socialism really is the opposite of what America is about. But I'd like to put another option on the table and that is that Bernie isn't really a socialist. Indeed, most Americans who call themselves "socialist" at one time or another aren't really socialists*.

What Bernie is is where he sits and he sits at the intersection of two deeply embedded American traditions: progressivism and toryism. These are outsider movements, mostly because they have suffered serious defeats in the past. Progressivism's big defeat was the 21st Amendment. Toryism's big defeat was the passage of the Suffolk Resolves. Neither ideology has ever fully recovered from those defeats but neither has gone away either. Combined, they make for a potent mix of moralism and elitist rent-seeking that, left unchecked, will sweep us all into servitude.

Or, to put it another way, he represents something undesirable but not something foreign. The bad things that would come with a Bernie victory are not some funny little foreign dictator we can caricature. No, Bernie represents the sort of injuries we inflict on ourselves.









* Others really are and they are cheerfully willing to exploit useful idiots like Bernie and his supporters but that's another issue.