About Last Night

Michael Kinsley, who has his moments (but oh, those quarter-hours!), recently put his finger on something that’s always irritated me. We all know that politicians never tell the truth, but I don’t mind flat-out lies–that goes with the territory. What drives me wild is their inability to say anything without spinning it. Whatever else you may think of him, Howard Dean occasionally does otherwise, as Kinsley points out:

After calling Saddam’s capture “a great day” for the military, for Iraqis, and for Americans generally, he added that it was “frankly, a great day for the administration.” This is a rare example of a politician saying “frankly” and then saying something actually frank. It comes close to admitting the obvious: that this development helps Bush’s chance of winning next year’s election and therefore hurts Dean’s.

It’s a real mystery why politicians find it so hard to admit the obvious about the horse-race aspects of politics. No doubt it requires a dose of blind optimism to be a politician in the first place. Even Dennis Kucinich must think he has a 1-in-10,000 chance of becoming president, when his chance is actually much smaller. But there is also an annoying convention that you must pretend to a confidence you don’t feel. Anyone who doesn’t realize that this week’s news has been a big boost for Bush’s re-election is too stupid or blinded to be elected president. Yet the press will punish any candidate who says so, possibly because if the candidates take up stating the obvious, they’re stealing our material. The pols need to be coy and evasive so that we can tell it to you straight.

Once again, this is not–repeat, not–a political blog. My reason for drawing your attention to Kinsley’s column has to do with the impeccably cultural topic of what used to be called “manners,” by which I don’t mean choosing the right fork. It is an aspect of American manners that our politicians emulate our advertisers by engaging in the 24-hour robotic spin that determines their every public utterance: “So, Senator, how do you explain the presence of that cheap hooker in your hotel room?” “When I am elected president, the failed economic policies of the current administration will be reversed, thus reducing the burden on the middle class!” (No doubt this phenomenon is in large part a function of the takeover of the political process by lawyers.) In the process, they debase the culture as well, precisely because they’re not fooling anybody. When the men and women who lead us, or wish to lead us, engage in such shameless and transparent verbal trickery, they are going far beyond the necessary quotient of euphemism that lubricates everyday human transactions. They are proving themselves consistently untrustworthy in small things. Why, then, should we trust them in large ones?

I doubt I’m the only person in America who’s noticed this phenomenon, and who finds it more than merely disagreeable. I’ve posted this description of contemporary politicians before, but it’s worth repeating:

A walking, talking person-shaped but otherwise not very human amalgam of “positions,” that familiar, tirelessly striving figure interviewed on the evening news who resoundingly tells you what he is thinking–and you keep wondering whether you should believe a word of it. These are people who don’t seem to live in the world so much as to inhabit some point on graph paper, whose coordinates are (sideways) the political spectrum and (up and down) the latest overnight poll figures.

It’s from Meg Greenfield’s Washington, a book written in secret by the woman who ran the editorial page of the Washington Post for years–and who made sure her truth-telling wouldn’t see print until after her death. It’s brilliantly put, but what does it say about Washington (or about Greenfield, for that matter) that she considered it too hot to publish while she was still alive?

Back in World War II, shortly before the greasy cloud of spin had settled on the land, Gen. Joseph Stilwell, whose nickname was “Vinegar Joe,” met the press after having been forced to retreat from Burma by the Japanese. He said, “I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and re-take it.”

The day any politician of either party makes so blunt a remark within earshot of microphones–and declines to retract, moderate, or invert it before the day is out–you’ll know the barometer of cultural health in America is moving in the right direction. But don’t hang by your thumbs waiting for it.

If you own an iPod, or are an Apple fanatic, you’d better read this. Now.

Got that, OGIC?

Sorry, Terry! But that’s not how I say it (see the post directly below). I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been oh-gic (with a hard “G”) to me. I’m just not fond of that chewy “odge” sound, and I definitely prefer the long “O,” like the letter. I think this makes my pronunication sound more like the acronym it is, which I like. I’ve never been known by an acronym before, and I’m finding it rather enchanting. Makes me feel kind of official. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to go over your head here and declare mine the official pronunciation.

Funny, isn’t it, that we never discovered we were saying this differently?

And yes, I did make a Liza Minnelli reference up there. Weird, huh?

Eric Felten has a very interesting piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about advertisers who pitch to the 18-to-34 cohort, and why they’re foolish to do so. This paragraph is particularly relevant:

A few years ago the Chicago Symphony commissioned a survey that found the average age of its concert-goers to be 55. But the orchestra’s president, Henry Fogel, didn’t fall for the actuarial fallacy. Instead he checked similar research done 30 years earlier and found that the average age at that time was also 55. “There is simply a time in one’s life when subscribing to a symphony orchestra becomes both desirable and possible,” says Mr. Fogel, now president of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Acting on this insight, the Chicago Symphony is wooing boomers who, though they may still enjoy their old Beatles records, long for a new musical experience. The orchestra has targeted new subscribers by advertising on, of all places, a local “classic rock” station.

Read the whole thing here. I think Felton is dead right, but as one who has blogged aggressively about the need for arts organizations to target and capture a younger audience, I should point out that in the context of symphony orchestras and opera companies, “younger” means “younger than 70,” not “18 to 34.” And when it comes to creating a younger audience, don’t forget that arts education in the public schools is in decline. The question everybody is asking, or ought to be asking, is this: how hard is it to persuade people of a certain age (i.e., mine) to make a serious commitment to an art form about which they know little or nothing going in?

I just wrote a piece for Commentary (I’ll link to it when it’s available on line) about how I became interested in the visual arts. I am an adult convert–I didn’t start looking at painting and sculpture until I was 40 years old. So it can happen. But I was an aesthete going in: I was already habituated to the notion of seeking pleasure through high art. If the Chicago Symphony is counting on there being enough people like me in Chicagoland to pay its bills in the coming decade, I have a feeling that they’re whistling Schoenberg.

I’m reading the revised edition of City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, a book by David Sucher, who blogs, logically enough, at City Comforts. Sucher has popped up on this site before, usually in connection with modern architecture. He can be quite thought-provokingly testy, in the very best tradition of bloggers. Take a look at his blog–and definitely buy his book. It’s a manual of dos and don’ts about urban planning on a human scale, and it is immensely readable (not to mention beautifully designed).

You may not think this topic interests you, but if you live in or near a city, it does whether you know it or not, and Sucher has an uncanny knack for simplifying complicated issues by reducing them to practical essentials. I’ve never read anything so illuminating about what he calls “the sociable city.”

To order the book, go here. I strongly recommend it.

Cinetrix writes about obsessive filmgoers:

You’ve seen them, too. Perhaps even dodged them. Unlike film students, they don’t go to the movies because they’re supposed to, they go to the movies because they have to. The darkness is asylum and escape from a world that’s never just like it is on the silver screen.

(Read the whole thing here.)

No doubt I have these tendencies, too, though I never noticed them until the afternoon a few years ago when I attended a matinee devoted exclusively to Warner Bros. cartoons. Granted, this was in New York, but as I stood in the lobby and looked around me at the visibly peculiar souls drawn by the prospect of spending an hour and a half with Bugs, Daffy, and Wile E. Coyote, I thought to myself, What must I look like to them?

I had this thoroughly unsettling experience in mind when I wrote the first paragraph of “What Randolph Scott Knew,” an essay about the Westerns of Budd Boetticher included in A Terry Teachout Reader (preorder your copy today!).

If you long to meet odd people, it’s hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who flock to revival houses on sunny spring afternoons to take in the latest week-long tribute to Alexander Dovzhenko, Ida Lupino, or maybe Edgar G. Ulmer–it scarcely matters, since the same folks show up every time, no matter what’s showing….

It isn’t just filmheads, of course. Danceheads and operaheads are the same way, and since I partake of all of the above obsessions, plus a few others, what does that make me? But at least in New York you know you’re not alone. I can’t think of another city where it’s possible to satisfy so many different obsessions so thoroughly, or to be a member of so many different social groups whose membership doesn’t overlap at all. I first noticed this at my fortiety birthday party (one of the very few parties, incidentally, that I’ve ever thrown, or had thrown for me). I didn’t know a room could have so many different corners, much less that each could be inhabited with its very own gaggle of recognizably similar people.

Perhaps all my obsessions cancel one another out and leave in their wake the residue of an approximately normal human being. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Erin O’Connor, who blogs at Critical Mass, writes this morning about The Human Stain–the novel, not the movie–from the point of view of “the human cost of the culture of campus speech codes.” In light of my unenthusiastic earlier posting on the film, it’s hugely interesting to read what she has to say, and even more interesting to read this striking quote from the book:

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

Read O’Connor’s own trenchant posting here. And if you haven’t bookmarked Critical Mass, do so. It’s indispensable.

“I know of nothing more beautiful than the Appassionata, I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people’s heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal–it is a hellishly hard task.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, quoted in Maxim Gorky, Days with Lenin