"Pro-sex feminism" as a paradigm for a left-populist moral consensus.

Girldrive
An article in the Chicago Reader discusses a new book that offers a fresh approach to understanding salient commonalities and contradictions in contemporary American feminism. Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism is a travelogue that compiles the testimony and experiences of feminists (not necessarily self-identified as such) across the 'lower 48' states of varying racial, cultural and socioeconomic profiles. Kind of an interesting idea in itself. But what interests me most about the project is the identity of one of its young co-authors and the overarching political project that is implicit in much of her work.

It should be said that the story of the book's creation -- at once inspiring and tragic -- is as complicated and worthy of attention as its content. I won't dwell on it here except to mention that what's tragic is that co-author Emma Bee Bernstein took her own life before the book was completed and that more can be learned about this by reading the article in the Reader.

Aronowitz: Nona Willis and father Stanley
The other co-author is Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is the daughter of two intellectuals, both of whom were prominent figures in the American Left in the 60s and 70s. For many years, I have admired the scholarship of her father, the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, particularly for his politically engaged work in the sociology of education and his pioneering inquiries into the sociology of the workplace.

Since, in my limited understanding, issues of economic disparities and social class have played so central a role in Aronowitz's scholarship (as opposed to stuff like identity politics), it was with some surprise that I discovered that he was married to the late Ellen Willis, the feminist writer and critic. Willis was opposed to the puritanical stances that sometimes emanate from feminist circles, and is associated with what has been called "pro-sex feminism."

Ellen Willis and "pro-sex feminism"
The meaning of "pro-sex feminism" can be discerned through the following quotation from an article that Willis contributed to the Village Voice in 1981 (titled "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?"):

While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order. [...]

My god, that observation was prescient. I bet feminists in 1981 could not in their wildest dreams have imagined the ascendancy of theocracy under Bush and Cheney; even today the courting of religionists is common practice among politicians of every political stripe. And despite the fact that "feminism" is no longer the salient assignation that it was in the early eighties, the din of anti-(hetero)sexuality/anti-sex rhetoric can still be detected in a percentage of feminism's present-day manifestations. Willis categorized the practitioners within the feminist tendency of what she called "sexual conservatism" into two groups: (1) the monogamists and (2) the separatists:

These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power. [...]

I don't care who you are and what your attitude toward feminism is (if you're like me, you support feminism and might even be a feminist, but you basically almost never think about it and tend to devote more attention to certain sets of systemic injustices that are preventing human and political emancipation along lines of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity), the above passage is really well written and thought-provoking and makes you wonder: why aren't people writing stuff like that these days? Is it partly because "alternative weeklies" like the Village Voice and the Chicago Reader are now owned by evil, corpora-financial interests?

A de facto feminism that is already out there, waiting to be described
Anyway, it's encouraging to see that Ellen Willis's corpus of feminist writings, including especially her "pro-sex" stance, have informed the work in the burgeoning career of her daughter. Nona Willis Aronowitz is still (very, for a journalist about whom I'm bothering so much as to blog) young, and the jury's still out on whether she'll become a writer of the talent and insight of her mother.

What's most encouraging is that she already understands the tidbit of wisdom that I believe to be indispensable to a future for the American Left: it must get the hell out of American's self-styled, middle class-bohemian echo chamber and start giving a voice to the people who are getting screwed worst of all in this country: poor people, both whites and minorities and both from the inner-city and the Great Plains. Nona Willis Aronowitz is spot-on when it comes to the necessity of this outreach. Behold the following quote from the Reader article:

[...] "Feminism, [says Aronowitz] for me, is women owning up to realities of sexism—but feminism as identity is less important than realizing those things and having gendered consciousness [sic].

[...] "Some of the most badass feminists we met were raised in conservative families or oppressive communities. I couldn't believe the urgency of women working in Fargo and Louisiana, the Bible Belt and Austin—they were way more passionate than a lot of women in big cities with big feminist communities."

These subjects—clinic defenders, Chicana activists, community organizers, and other women helping women on the ground—inspired Aronowitz and Bernstein to change their tack. The book's initial outline had been somewhat autobiographical, but as they put more miles between them and Chicago, they realized the stories that needed to be told weren't necessarily their own. "These women don't have a chance to be heard," says Aronowitz. "It started to feel urgent to let them speak for themselves."

Toward a Left-populism
What I find most compelling about Aronowitz's characterization of the project of her book is that it stands as a paradigm for precisely the program of left-populist thought and activism that stands the best chance preserving the foundations of civil liberties, self-governance and checks-and-balances enshrined in the Constitution.

To my mind, a Left that is premised upon a project of democratic emancipation cannot sustain itself -- and if not in the United States, with its vital republican constitution and traditions, then where? -- without being willing and able to take the form of a no-bullshit, intelligent Left-populism.

It is way too easy for the Left to fall into the same habits of the past thirty or forty (or more) years -- among them: defeatism, self-pity, pedantry, the fetishization of 'expertise', the fetishization of credentials, excessive intellectual and moral balkanization, regionalism, etc. --, but to pursue such a course would mean ceding all of our political autonomy (not just existing, but potential) to the reigning plutocracy (and a succession of future real- and potential-plutocratic [re-]configurations).

A Left-populist moral consensus cannot be prudish, because real people aren't prudish
We have to start, just as Aronowitz and Bernstein did, with the people who are already out there doing it. Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that a Left-populist moral consensus can only emerge around themes that that everyday people really do care about. Not an imagined version of morally upright, pious, unselfconscious 'everyday people': that's bullshit and pandering and a lie.

It's easy to know what people care about, because even if they don't always come out and say what it is, they do, inevitably and frequently, talk about it.

Here's a perfect example: sex. It's really easy to tell that human beings care about and think about sex because they talk about it all the time.

Karl Rove wanted everybody to think that there's this unimaginably enormous population of far-Right Christian religionists that constituted the largest and most monolithic voting block in the history of the universe. And for a long time, he succeeded. But, before long, everyone came to realize that it was actually a bunch of smoke-and-mirrors. And eventually, that becomes replaced with another bunch of smoke-and-mirrors -- the birther-movement, the tea-bagger movement, the neo-Nazi resurgence, etc., etc.

Maybe what I'm trying to say here is this: I'm as put-off by the smoke-and-mirrors shows as anyone else. But the response of the Left should not be to call for bans on smoke-and-mirrors shows, to denounce entire red-state populations on the basis of such spectacles, or to mount opposing smoke-and-mirrors production numbers!

It should be to call it what it is, to say: what a bunch of fucking loonies and point out how they are a playing perfectly into an ongoing succession of time-wasting distractions that muddy political discourses in our current landscape of consolidated media and micro-commerce. If a Left-populist movement puts real effort into doing precisely this, if it insists continually upon exploding mythologies rather than perpetuating them, it will make friends, not enemies out in the American countryside as well as deep in the American cityscape.

What say you?

Trouble The Water: go see it.

I kept forgetting to mention this. If you've not seen it, I recommend highly this feature-length documentary, which currently enjoys some form of limited theatrical release.

Trouble The Water gives us a glimpse into the experience of residents of New Orleans' poorest neighborhoods, ignored by the city's meager evacuation efforts -- an 'evacuation' that provided no transportation for the benefit of residents who lacked access to an automobile. These residents were abandoned to endure Hurricane Katrina from the confines of their homes, located in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable to the flooding that occurred as a consequence of the breach of the infamous nearby levies.

The protagonist of this film is the New Orleans rap artist Kimberly Roberts whose home-video footage comprises some of the most candid and shocking sequences of the film. She and her friends and family sit huddled in their attic for hour upon hour. Footage captured by Roberts from her attic window reveals common street-signs that are almost entirely submerged by the flood waters. She and the other residents of her neighborhood watch as the water-line continues to rise; many fellow residents -- including elderly people -- are trapped in the crevices of their attics, with no way of freeing themselves. Others are left to perish of starvation.

Even after the rain ceases, no government agency, no rescue operation is anywhere to be found. Those confined to the Roberts home are lucky to spot a stray row-boat passing by -- two and a half stories above where the street would normally be. Using this boat, Roberts's husband Scott, along with others, mounts a couple of heroic rescues of nearby residents. Still: no police, no coast guard, no national guard, no FEMA. And yet, "Brownie" -- we are reminded -- is said to have done "a heck of a job."

The extraordinary story continues, following Kimberly and Scott Roberts as they escape to some semblance of safety, only to contend with racism, bureaucracy, long-lines, paperwork and contempt. Through it all, Kimberly Roberts remains at once unflinching in her willingness to speak truth to power, and unyielding in her optimism. She's an absolutely amazing woman.

If you're not one for righteous indignation, this might not be the movie you'll most enjoy seeing, but you should see it anyway. A human being cannot help but get mad at what he sees, as the Roberts and their friends are forced to confront hypocrisy and injustice at every turn, in the fight for their very survival. There are really only a couple of moments at which the film becomes a little preachy. But I think it more than earns the right to be that way a couple of times. Apart from these miniscule, arguable exceptions, Trouble The Water allows its subjects and their circumstances to speak for themselves.

In conclusion (sorry...I've always wanted to write a final paragraph that begins "In conclusion..."), go see Trouble The Water if and when it appears at a cinema near you, and tell your friends to do the same.

Obama kicked ass last night and everybody knows it.

I wrote the following paragraphs as a comment on a blog called Media Nation, in which I agreed with an article the blogger had written that the media -- particularly in Washington -- have given too much credit to McCain's performance in last night's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi, and it's not a surprise that polls are now showing that the public -- particularly undecided voters -- see it the same way I do. What was I doing, you ask, commenting on somebody's blog? My answer is that I've become a complete and utter dork, and it's this election business that done me in.

Those who credit McCain with continually "putting Obama on the defensive" miss the point.

The pundit caste has made a cliche of this notion of "putting the other guy on the defensive." The problem with cliches, of course, is that people forget what they mean. Some of the commentary on last night's debate exemplifies this tendency. This tactic means nothing by virtue of its deployment per se, but rather, as a means by which to gain certain advantages. If those advantages don't accrue to you, then putting the other guy on the defensive means nothing.

McCain's attacks/challenges to Obama's credibility were, one after another, disposed of quickly and tidily by Obama. Obama appeared calm the entire time, while McCain looked at all times to be straining to come up with novel forms of slander. Oftentimes, McCain's soliloquies would stray far off the topic, and he appeared to be hogging microphone time, while Obama patiently waited, exchanging polite glances with Lehrer.

Lastly: while Obama expressed, at appropriate times, his agreement with one or another premise of McCain's answers, while interjecting his differences, McCain appeared at all times to be nervously guarding his territory against ANY possibility that Obama could utter something credible. This had the effect of making Obama appear all the more 'presidential', calm and reasonable. Obama was careful to mitigate McCain's rhetorical excesses and over-the-top insinuations with fair-minded, calm rebuttals.

The overall effect, in other words, is that McCain's assiduousness in striving to "play offense" MADE HIM LOOK DEFENSIVE. Like an impetuous child, throwing a tantrum. The overly nasty and petty nature of many of McCain's attacks became in and of themselves REAFFIRMATIONS of Obama's credibility, savvy and strength of judgment and character.

Think of it this way: poor McCain, in patting himself on his back for his own 'maverickness' and even his own service to his country, his endless repetitions, his inability EVER to cede ground to his opponent, looked like someone who, nervously and twitchily, is scared to death that you're not going to believe him, and even that HE's worried about losing the ability to believe HIMSELF.

I think the media completely missed most of what matters about the debate; they are far too generous in their appraisal of McCain's performance.

In my view, the debate was nothing short of a triumph for Obama. He looked like a responsible adult. McCain looked like an inflexible old coot. I can't imagine a single swing-voter being swayed by McCain's performance. Obama, on the other hand, showed his stuff. He came across as competent, credible and--perhaps most importantly--honest.

I grew up during the Reagan Administration.That's not the reason to elect Barack Obama, but we should elect him anyway.

...And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.

We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue...

-- Ronald Reagan, 'The Space Shuttle "Challenger" Tragedy Address',
televised on 28 January 1986.

I grew up during the Reagan Administration, followed by four years of George H.W. Bush, passing into my adolescence during the Bill Clinton years. For now, I want to ramble about the twelve years of Reagan/Bush, both the things about those years that I remember from having lived through them and the things I remember about them from having lived subsequent to them. We can talk about the Clinton years at another time (or maybe we just shouldn't talk about them ever!).

I. The world was flat.

It was a time, Dear Reader, of a mass-cultural FLATTENING, during which the consciousness (and conscience) each and every American was slowly but surely DUMBED-DOWN until he became a castaway on his own self-involved, lazy-brained isle of ostensible plenty. The expanding use of plastics in the creation and packaging of cheap consumer junk ushered in a new and more profitable era in planned obsolescence. It was the time during which the Cold War reached the apotheosis of its self-sustaining outlandishness: I'm referring, of course, to the 'Star Wars' missile defense initiative. (Which only ever existed on paper, in tax dollars, and in the meticulously-TelePrompted, content-bereft cadences of Reagan's slow-motion national addresses... Of course, Bush, Cheney, Condi and Co. are clamoring for Star Wars 2.0: 'DA RETURN!!'.)

It was a time of unthinking acquiescence to received wisdom; of consensus formed through every man, woman and child's desire to count himself among the espousers of the consensus-view, of bloated, diet-trend-chasing conventionally and of political and economic group-think. A time that found us aiming our frustrations, criticisms, guilt complexes, and intellectual energies inward; publicly, we adopted the hard-driving but collegial manner of an Atomized Individual Economic Actor after Milton Friedman's own heart. Foot-soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. Power suits. Gay Republicans. The ascendancy of identity politics in academe. Myopia, hypocrisy. Bedazzlement with the shiny gadgetry of Empire. The Magic of Spielberg™, and his big-budget authoritarian morality plays. Disney, and such cinematic achievements as Flight of the Navigator.

II. Politics of Bush/Cheney condones openly the undermining of the moral authority (and coherence) of the USA's democratic project.

But I'll allow that the era of Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, New Coke and Coke Classic had something going for it that eight years of George W. Bush lacks. It pertains to W.'s style of governance (if we can call it either style or governance...), or rather, what it lacks. The Reagan years had as one of its pillars a public face that sought to be seen as serving the interests of the rule of law rather than setting the rule of law aside as bothersome or even naive. A set of communications-directives that took pains not simply to lie to the American people, but to tell all of the right lies. That took as a given the necessity of being seen not only to respect the United States Constitution, but to be seen as actively upholding it.

I know this might seem like a minor point -- after all, I'm talking only about rhetoric and propaganda -- but for me it's one of the most distressing things about our current situation. Sure, back in the 80's there was Iran Contra and a billion sketchy/criminal military adventures, but at least the bastards bothered to lie in such a way as to offer most credulous or self-preoccupied people in this country the psychological bulwark of plausible deniability. Joe Briefcase could go on believing sincerely that the values of the United States -- you know, as inscribed in the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights? -- set the parameters of Executive Branch activity in -- at the very least -- its objective, tone and spirit.

That really does make a difference, because at least in those days, the racists and xenophobes from -- I don't mean to generalize, 'cause there are plenty of exceptions to this regional truism -- the South couldn't openly rally around the cause of preserving measures and policies that are essentially fascistic, both in their intent and in their means of execution. For instance, when it is revealed that the has CIA waterboarded a couple of people under the cloak of secrecy, that pisses me off now, and it would surely have pissed me off during the 80's and 90's. The sudden revelation that actual torture is being conducted by the United States would have caused much bigger shock waves among the ocean of citizens of the United States than this exact revelation -- except on a much greater scale -- has caused today. (Or, there'd have been at least a shock wave!)

3. Moral revulsion vs. despotic authoritarianism.

However, Reagan-era GOP politicians had a way of turning this very shock to their advantage by mircomanaging the nature and focus of the cognitive dissonance experienced by the public. When a credulous population becomes privy to knowledge that doesn't quite seem to be at home among the other things its government has said it has done or would do; when, the vast majority of broadcast- and written-news sources are hopelessly compliant, anodyne, condescending and middlebrow (everything from The CBS Evening News to Larry King to David Brooks), well, Sir, Joe America just goes ahead and brushes it off as an anomaly! Supposing that there had been some kind of exposé published in Harper's Magazine in, like 1985; most of us could -- and therefore, would -- surely convince ourselves -- subconsciously if not consciously -- that the sordid practice that had been unearthed represented a contemptible yet isolated practice, and that all of the requisite channels would surely be pursued in bringing its gang of perpetrators to justice (!).

To be sure, it of course wouldn't have been true that the practice was isolated, and I don't deny for a moment that there are unnerving harms that accrue from the kind of false consciousness that plausible deniability taps into. But, I have to say that by contrast, it is far more disturbing to witness, as we do today, rednecks -- both unreconstructed and in their exurban, Jesus-loving, middle-management-type Joe America incarnation -- rallying around the cause of actually justifying depraved, wicked, and -- I would honestly (and perhaps naively) have assumed throughout my entire life, heretofore -- Un-American practices.

What's shocking to witness is that in the current era of Bush/Cheney, when the veil is lifted from such an onslaught of depravity, cynicism and hypocrisy, the effect is (1) an upsurge in masochistic/patriotic fervor for despotism among lots of (although surely not all) uneducated people, and (2) one of little more than a widespread gross-out and disdain from onlookers who feel totally helpless to change the political and moral tide in the United States. Of course, I identify myself, for better or worse, as one of this second group of onlookers. I was raised, after all, in a nominally middle class (by which I mean upper-middle class) home during the Disneyland 80's. My sense of anguish and doom at the state of things in this country often reaches extremes of hopelessness, nausea and existential confusion.

So I and others who are disgusted by the things that are being revealed about our government, and about the Bush/Cheney Executive Branch in particular, are at this point just trying to cope with all of this evil and madness -- and I'm quite sure that our reaction is shared by the vast majority of people, which is not always the same thing as the vast majority of voters. And anyway, this group is fractured in so many ways, and politicians and advertisers are doing their best to keep our conception of our self-interest fractured (of which, more commentary soon [hint: a significant ray of hope that we can consolidate our power lies in the candidacy of Barack Obama]).

Meanwhile, we watch the first group -- a contingent of uneducated poor people from Alabama or wherever -- whose identification with militarism comes from its lack of access to life options other than either joining the military or working at Quickie-Mart, whose blood lust comes partly from ignorance (which could have been spared them if there were decent schools for them to attend), partly from sexual repression (which is deepened by the stranglehold of extreme, hyperconservative, evangelical quasi-Christianity), and partly from a deep class resentment, the true, economics-based nature of which US culture has taught it not to be able to identify, in favor of cultural resentment, liberation-consumerism, xenophobia and the taking of pride in one's own backwardness.

It's gross...

IV. Let's consolidate our political power to put an end to the USA's dalliances with despotism under Bush & Cheney.

I guess my thought is this: is there a way for people who feel as disgusted as I do to create political solidarity among the widest group of voters that I possibly can? I mean, I know anecdotally that there are plenty of people in the country, both my age, older and younger, who are equally upset about this stuff on an equally visceral, existential level. In other words, all of us who feel this way -- irrespective of what other political views of cultural values we hold in common, irrespective of whether we prefer going to cocktail parties or bible-study meetings -- feel it with passion and don't know exactly how to stop the unchecked, onward march of the immorality and self-destructiveness of the present political course of the United States.

V. Barack Obama's 8/28/08 speech begins successfully to consolidate support for rebuilding the USA's moral authority.

Well; as it happens, most of the preceding rant was written a few days before this post. But I think that we have a figure around whom we can rally support for rebuilding American moral authority, and saving the idea of democracy so that it can live to see another day. That figure is, of course, Barack Obama. And contrary to the unthinking and flippant commentary of rightwing hired goons like David Brooks (who used the term "underwhelmed" in his characteristically simple-minded reaction on PBS -- screw you, you fake moderate liar; you're nothing but Rush Limbaugh in a three piece suit...), Barack's speech last night was amazing.

What many commentators (Brooks included) seemed to miss was this: the point of having upwards of 80,000 people assembled at the speech was not because of the impact it would have on Obama's rhetoric; it's because of the reaction shots! Anybody who paid any attention could see that witnessing that many people -- a group that was genuinely and unmistabably diverse -- being moved to tears by their shared purpose, values, goals and sense of urgency sends a very powerful set of signals indeed to a very broad cross-section of the United States population.

I thought it was breathtaking. Here it is:

The genius of John Lydon (Part I):"Two sides to every story / Somebody had to stop me..."

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I'm not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property!

-- John Lydon, in P.i.L's "Public Image"

This item inaugurates a series of posts dedicated to the discussion of the lyrics, singing, songwriting, image, fashion sense, rhetoric, persona and politics of John Lydon. I'll explain more about what I'll be discussing as I go along (since that's when I'll be deciding what I'll be discussing). Lydon -- a.k.a. Johnny Rotten -- is a complex artist, and almost every aspect of his career and life is more or less contentious. I don't intend to get to the bottom of any deep debates, particularly not as regards Lydon's significance in the United Kingdom, because his career draws from and contributes to the UK cultural consciousness in ways that will always remain partly beyond the scope of my comprehension.

In fact, my chief goal in hammering out these brainstorms about John Lydon is to make a case that people in the United States should take his contributions to music and culture more seriously; also that the US is now in many respects ready to understand Lydon's work, because the country has gone through plenty of growing up since the late '70s: a period not noted for American optimism, but which in retrospect appears to have been extremely naive, especially in comparison to the culturally revolutionary activities taking place in London contemporaneously.

I also should make clear that I'm not much going to be talking about Lydon's work during his creatively bankrupt phases, of which there have definitely been a few. To the extent that I touch upon, for instance, the Lydon of Public Image Ltd.'s 1983 release Live In Japan (not recommended!), it will be to point out how his work at its best is so good and so important that such missteps carry zero weight in a serious assessment of the quality and impact of Lydon's overall career.

I. Three general hypotheses.

It's my intention to argue that John Lydon, despite being held in high esteem by many punk rock enthusiasts, record collectors, and otherwise 'tuned in'-types, has not been given the sustained critical attention that is his due for his innovative and enduring contributions to arts and culture. For evidence of this, we need look no further than archived film, video and news articles about the Sex Pistols, which are quite often so hyperbolic, so full of clichés, so superficial, as to demean their subject. This is true, by the way, irrespective of whether the article or television spot in question is favorable or unfavorable!

For example, unfailingly they'll refer -- either blithely or enthusiastically -- to Lydon's lyrics or attitude as 'nihilistic', which in fact is a terribly wrong-headed term with which to describe his work. They'll read sarcasm into his moments of greatest sincerity, they'll mistake honesty for braggadocio, and they'll mistake braggadocio for hate. They'll read his odes to self-centeredness as disdain for that which is external to the self. And let's pause on this for a moment: just think about the kind of mind that thinks "self-centered = bad thing," instead of, for instance, asking itself "bad in relation to what, exactly?" And then going on to think, "Mighn't there be some things in relation to which self-centeredness is good? And what might those things be?"

Obviously, journalism and particularly music journalism isn't going to give us the latter mind. So I therefore am undertaking to brainstorm about what more people would know, were the latter mind out there writing for USA Today. But to begin with, we would be well served to explore what cultural or historical trends might hold regular media back. To account for this failure to give Johnny his due on the part of journalists and other types who are in the business of 'due-giving', I have a host of hypotheses. Just to list three rather general examples:

1. Plenty of ink has been spilled particularly in England on the subject of John 'Johnny Rotten' Lydon. Believe it or not -- despite all the dust kicked up by London's famously lowbrow tabloids, beginning with The Sex Pistols' famous appearance on the UK's Bill Grundy tea-time television show
   
   
   
   -- at least a respectable percentage of the commentary on Lydon's projects over the years in the UK actually treated its subject seriously. However, paradoxically, because the impact of the Pistols exploding into English culture was so seismic, a lot of what Lydon represents is by definition left unsaid by commentators from within that culture, even those commentaries that are most wildly sympathetic to Lydon's work and point of view. A gruesome but nonetheless instructive point of comparison in the United States is September 11th. If we were to look back at newspaper articles in the months and years following that event, it's unlikely that after an initial period we would find references to the details of that day. You just take it as a given. There's no reason to talk about all of its details explicitly. *
   
   
2. By its very nature, The Sex Pistols' -- and especially John Lydon's -- persona and media presence is/was oppositional. Therefore, the band's and the singer's impact is measured most fruitfully by the degree to which media reports and the rantings of the commentariat reacted to rather than assessed soberly the phenomenon of The Sex Pistols. There's nothing wrong with this fact as such. But it means that the articles or commentaries have a very short shelf-life. They appear to contemporary eyes -- especially if those eyes are American -- to be as ponderous and obscure as, say, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (not recommended!).
   
   
3. While all of the above holds true particularly on the Right Side of the Pond, here in the US of A, the problem could be described as the converse of both 1) and 2). The music and culture-oriented media here -- to the extent that they can be said to exist -- simply don't know or understand or care about how revolutionary was the impact of The Sex Pistols in their native land. This goes not just for glossy toilet paper like, whatever, Rolling Stone or something, but also for media that should know what the fuck they're talking about but don't. You know, sophomoric middlebrow, middle class crap like Pitchfork Internet Magazine or whatever it's called, which is in a way even worse than Rolling Stone, because it doesn't pay its writers, and its writers write like it.

II. Oppositional thinking ≠ nihilism.

There. I've drawn our attention to the fact that the American press tends neither to know it's history nor to care about the history of cultures outside of its purview/target market, and that this has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't understand Lydon, and especially didn't understand him during the late 70s. Compounding this problem is another uniquely American phenomenon whose relevance is undeniable despite the fact that it's....erm....extrinsic to the question of the relation between media and Lydon himself.

Our country's free fall into a bucktoothed, torture-promoting, redneck, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, corporate-oligarchic shambles has been set in motion by more than merely the blood-lust alliance brokered between the uneducated and stupid in one corner, and the neurotically fearful and repressed in the other. True, ours is a drooling and masochistic nation, but that's not what lies at the center of its obsession with mediocrity. To the contrary, the USA's real reason for failing to comprehend the nature of Lydon's art, politics and persona has to do with naiveté. Or maybe: a kind of insouciance.

Let me put it this way, it's for largely the same reasons that people in the United States have still managed to trick themselves into believing that there's no class system here. And if we have trouble coming to grips with that now, in the midst of the Second Gilded Age, you can be sure that we had trouble understanding it in the 1970s. Not that the 70s was a by any means prosperous time here in the good old US of A... But it was a naive time. The mainstream could no more have understood Johnny Rotten than it could have produced its very own Johnny Rotten, out of the remotest enclaves of Orange County.

No, the United States was on balance unprepared for the Pistols when they landed here and marched like a counter-clockwise Sherman through the unsuspecting countryside of the Bible Belt. Actually, I think in a weird way those Southern towns were somewhat ready, as evinced by the willingness of their cowboy-dressin' citizens to engage in confrontation,, particularly in San Antonio, where they gave as good as they got. And what they got was Sid Vicious cutting himself, calling the audience (in a righteously inspired moment), "a bunch of fucking faggot cowboys," and thwarting the advance of a particularly menacing faggot cowboy by hitting him over the head with his bass guitar.

Irrespective of the American South's readiness, San Francisco definitely wasn't. By the time Lydon came charging through with the early P.i.L line-ups, there had already emerged nationwide substantial pockets of understanding, receptive people. But the vast majority of culture still wasn't ready; they liked The Clash, maybe (and nowadays, what upwardly mobile professional doesn't like The Clash?), but Lydon was, in the estimation of the mainstream, still too demanding. Too, er....'nihilistic'.....

Tom Snyder: Back now with John and Keith who are with Public Image Limited. You know, it's been so long that I've almost forgotten where we were when we were at it!

John Lydon: Uh, you went into a bit of a tantrum as I likely remember!

Tom: Oh, yes I did.

John: You want to hear about us. Right. We have record commitments with Warner Brothers in America and Virgin for the rest of the world. We will, of course, oblige them, but, in the meantime, there is the possibility of us doing a soundtrack to a film in Hollywood. This interests us greatly.

Tom: What are . . .

John: We are not a band, we are a company. We have many interests. We are also making our own film in England right now at this very moment.

Tom: The music that you will do for the record companies that you mentioned. How will this music differ from what we thought was rock 'n' roll?

John: It's no more of that twelve-bar ditty, waving hair in the breeze, platform boots, flap your flair nonsense. It's not a packaged image of third-rate idiots. It's not a pose. We just do our stuff, hated as it usually is. I was very shocked by the reviews of the last album. I believe none of them. I think they liked us for the wrong reasons.

Tom: Well you told me all the things --

John: Trendy reasons. Can I have a cigarette again, please?

-- The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, 6/27/80

Is this exchange -- a video clip of which I have featured previously -- nihilism? The answer is that it so totally and utterly is not. When most former Lydon-naysayers encounter this golden nugget of Lydon lore with refreshed or attentive eyes, they find it exceedingly difficult to deny its brilliance. Fuck the charlatans like David Bowie: in the late '70's and early '80's John Lydon's total immersion in the trappings of a persona of his own invention is truly breathtaking to behold.

Of course it was rife with internal contradictions, of course it announced ambitions on which it could never ultimately make good. That's all more or less the point. The lines between theater and reality are blurred, and this blurring is always a gift to art, even if, from time to time, it may have cost Lydon his credibility in vast expanses of American straight society, people who are used to having their expectations and assumptions confirmed; people who are used to mediocrity. It's not these people to whom Lydon was or should have been reaching out: rather, it was their disaffected children. Who needs, after all, the kind of 'credibility' that would have accrued to him, to his name, to his brand were he to have on such occasions restrained himself from rocketing at breakneck speed to the spectacularly eloquent rhetorical extremes to which he would push his capacity to negate??

I'll tell you where such restraint would have gotten Lydon -- which is also, by the way, what we'd have gotten from him. Picture a John Lydon who focused not on individual emancipation, but on large-scale political change? A John Lydon who aims for the approval of the broadest possible cross-section of the music- and culture-consuming population. A John Lydon focused upon moderation; a John Lydon whose raison d'etre is consensus-building! All manner of restraint, politeness, dependability, bang for yer buck!, middlebrow-ness, all couched in a facile/sheek rhetoric of radicalism...

A John Lydon, in other words, who is out to uphold such binaries as authenticity vs. disposable pop, manly-man vs. pussy-licker, solidarity through discipline vs. creative, anarchistic utopianism, politics vs. beauty, brotherhood vs. individualism, etc., instead of setting out to dissolve these binaries. A John Lydon who first pauses to consider whether or not you will find what he has to say palatable before letting you know what he thinks. A John Lydon whose idea of respecting his audience is to be nice.

We're not necessarily out there to give people a good time.

-- Keith Levene, describing P.i.L's live performances, 1978.

So, what would this parallel-universe John Lydon look like?

It would look like The Clash, of course!

III. The Clash vs. The Sex Pistols

And, after all, there's nothing wrong with The Clash, in the same way that there's nothing wrong with the Stones's Sticky Fingers. You know, play it at the afternoon barbecue, and I won't complain.

But whereas The Clash was good -- at times, even great -- it was always just a rock 'n' roll band. The Sex Pistols and early P.i.L was and is much much much more than that.

To explain why the Pistols are far-and-away the greatest of the original wave of UK punk bands we could simply point out Lydon's and Co.'s disdain for the term 'punk' -- who the fuck gave you license to label me? insisted ** John Lydon in 1976, when the term first appeared in the UK press, describing him as 'King of the Punks'. And as for 'rock', The Sex Pistols were, after all supposed to be that Last Rock 'n' Roll Band. In other words, rock is "vile. It's dead, it's a disease."

But I'll go a tiny bit further to verify that beyond a shadow of a doubt, that The Sex Pistols kick The Clash's ass every time. As I remarked earlier, just take a look at The Clash's audience:

I give you Stephen Metcalf, Slate's good-natured -- if somewhat mealy-mouthed -- book critic-guy, in whose estimation The Clash reigns supreme. If ever you find yourself participating in the tried-and-true punk rock parlor game of THE CLASH VS. THE SEX PISTOLS: WHICH IS THE GREATEST PUNK BAND OF ALL TIME??, would you really want to find yourself choosing this man's side? Just look at him! It's so clear that he really really likes Bruce Springsteen, and probably what's more, he uses the phrase "creative class" with a straight face. I can't see for sure, but is that a pair of khaki shorts that he's wearing with his winning wrinkled blazer/twice-unbuttoned shirt combo? Try and convince me that he doesn't wear Birkenstocks, that he doesn't in fact refer to them as his "Birks," and that he doesn't wear his Birks while he listens to London Calling on his I-Phone, while sunning himself at his friends' timeshare? Just go ahead and try.

Metcalf reveals that he's partial to The Clash in an article that was published by Slate in 2005. In this article, he refers to the Pistols as "a bunch of lowlifes tossed together by a cunning impresario." I should explain that it's not entirely clear whether Metcalf means this as a dis or as high praise. Frankly, very few things about Metcalf's article are even partially clear, and the few things that are clear are also stupid.

Case in point: Metcalf's pro-Clash stance appears to hinge on the fact that -- unlike The Sex Pistols -- The Clash weren't in actuality a punk band at all. Instead, they were a rock 'n' roll band! And bulwarking Metcalf's thesis is the fact that the Strummer/Jones songwriting team consisted of a (furtively) middle class guy (Strummer) and a partner who was truly working class (Jones). Previous examples he identifies -- after conducting careful research -- are Jagger/Richards (middle class/working class) and Lennon/McCartney.

(I've heard it said many times that Lennon -- the writer, after all, of the brilliant "Working Class Hero" -- was not himself working class, but this point has been wildly overstated. Fine, he was upper-lower class then. There just wasn't that much of a difference. My real point, of course, is that the Metcalfs of the world are wasting their and our time by using such dumb criteria to categorize musical or pop-cultural phenomena. And my real real point is that the Metcalfs of the world should just, um...like, NOT write about music or pop culture or punk rock in the first place. [I should add that I do dig the specs he's wearing in this pic.***])

IV. The USA's malaise means that The Sex Pistols & early P.i.L
make more intuitive sense to us than ever.

And so anyway. This is where I would like to enter the conversation. Because, for some of the reasons articulated in the upper reaches of this post, the majority of media in the USA still get Lydon totally wrong. Even -- or perhaps especially -- the media that purport to like him. Doubtless for all the wrong reasons; trendy reasons. It's for all of the same reasons that a sizable portion of the American mainstream did understand the slogan-politics and militarism/machismo of The Clash. (And to give Strummer & Co. some credit, they too were obviously turned into a self-caricature for reasons that were not always the band's own doing.)

Lydon's art is not 'nihilistic'. Nor is it 'ironic'. Nor is it 'stream-of-consciousness'. Nor is or has Lydon ever been a 'bad singer'. In fact, he is the single most superb, innovative, important and influential singer of the last 30 years. Is Lydon's music 'punk rock'? Only if you mean it in the way that recognizes that 'punk rock' has no meaning.

Is Lydon's art 'oppositional'? You fucking bet it is. And herein lies the key.

To be continued...


________________

* Of course, in aftermaths of both the Pistols and of September 11th, people also eventually stopped thinking about it, which is a more complex issue that we won't go into right now.

** I'm paraphrasing here.

*** I should also point out, if I've not made it clear, that I actually like The Clash. I simply don't think they hold a candle to The Sex Pistols. This holds both musically and with respect to cultural significance. Not that I really believe those two things can be separated, but let's save that discussion for another day.....

Slavoj Žižek on authoritarian capitalism, other horrors.

In an interview, broadcast on Icelandic television (the date is unknown to me), Slavoj Žižek argues that the Left needs to take notice of the decoupling of capitalism and democracy, and--in the example of China, whose lead smaller states have begun to follow--the disturbing advance of authoritarian capitalism. Also discussed is biotechnology, the implications of which, he argues, traditional and current ethical discourses are ill-equipped to handle.

USA as 'classless society', part ∞: education.

The assumption that American society is classless is to mainstream/bourgeois media as hydrogen is to water. But every now and again, while reading a publication such as the online magazine Slate, I'll stumble upon a manifestation of this assumption's embeddedness that I find particularly cloying. Discussions of education that ignore or reflect an author's ignorance of the profound impact of class, racial politics and other historical and current forms of social stratification tend to make me sick to my stomach.

Tell me that Anne Applebaum's recent mouth-breathing rumination All Work and No Play Still Might Not Get Jack Into Harvard doesn't induce nausea in the pit of your tummy. An excerpt:

...[T]he parents of many driven children

Gee, I hate to interrupt so soon, but if "driven children" means anything at all, it refers to children whose means of ordering and comprehending their relationship to the world around them provides for a realizable measure of mastery, competence or autonomy, however construed. Each of these children grow up with either the conviction or the guarantee that there's a piece of the pie with his or her name on it, and it is their task to learn to slice it. So already Applebaum is speaking only of children born into families with a significant social and cultural foothold, a status a child attains only through the good fortune of having been born into the right family in the right place at the right time, and that almost always coincides with preexisting economic wealth.

In other words, Applebaum's "driven children" consists of a tiny, privileged minority. Anyway, she continues, the parents of "many" of these "driven children," who apparently were

raised on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie, retain a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts, in which "schooling" was optional, and in which dropping out was a romantic option....

Uh, right. And the thing about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie is that they're, uh, works of fiction. They are entertainments. They're also myths -- a perfectly fine thing for them to be, by the way -- that are to a lesser or greater extent themselves constructed from the raw materials of previous myths. The pioneer families of the Great Plains. The provincial Southern Town that may have its troubles, but deep down, there's a Heart of Gold. Applebaum knows that life wasn't really like that, right?

So why is it then that she lets this small minority of privileged parents of privileged children off the hook for -- apparently -- mistaking its own privileged yet workaday childhood for a mythical one that existed only in classic fiction and shitty television series? Could it be because this group is engaged in the same act of self-delusion as Applebaum: failure to see the concept of meritocracy for the myth that it is?

It's notable, this nostalgia, because it isn't necessarily shared by other countries. Certainly not by the British, some of whose children start taking serious, life-changing exams at age 11, nor by the Koreans whose children declare they can't let themselves "waste even a second" during their 15-hours-a-day, seven-days-a week quest to get into college, preferably Harvard. In fact, any country committed to meritocracy has to impose exams on its high-school seniors. Otherwise, university admissions will necessarily depend upon wealth, access, and parental connections.

Applebaum is missing the point. University admissions already depend upon "wealth, access, and parental connections." University admissions have always depended upon these things. What changed was that the myth of the United States as a "country committed to meritocracy" gained popularity, prominence and the support of Social Darwinist intellectuals during the American Gilded Age. It's more than mere coincidence that meritocracy's rise to prominence occurred during the fucking Gilded Age. There was a brief moment in the wake of World War II, driven by public spending on social services like the G.I. Bill, during which the playing field did even out the tiniest bit, but those days are long gone, Applebaum.

More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes oddly with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the "basic" level in science (only 2 percent qualify as "advanced"), the "Dumbest Generation" of semi-literates glued to their cell phones, and the enormous number of teenagers—a stunning one-third of the total—who fail to graduate from high school on time. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because "I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life," it's no surprise that solutions to the drop-out crisis often involve the imposition of stricter school regimes, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure, and, yes, more testing.

This is the part that just makes me want to fucking wretch. Tell me, Anne Applebaum, do you suppose that the "46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the 'basic' level in science" are on a level playing field with your precious "driven children," vying for spots at Harvard?

Thus are our kids both stupider than we were and harder working

Well, let's give Applebaum the benefit of the doubt and suppose that she's describing our shared American narrative of classlessness. She doesn't, of course, take a moment to point out that classlessness itself is the most pernicious myth of all. So, instead of calling her stupid or deluded, let's just call her evil.

—though perhaps this makes sense.

Ermmm, Anne, let's not get ahead of ourselves...

Evoking at once the myopia of a county club mom burdened with arranging schedules for her children's tennis lessons and the self-undermining pro-atomized individualism of a fat, exurban AM radio-listener, Applebaum's self-deception -- be it rhetorical or real -- that we Americans are all on a level playing field is just about the most laughable and disgusting thing I can recall having read in Slate. And considering that the magazine includes contributions from Christopher Hitchens, that's no small thing.