I Contain Multitudes

Art, culture, history and ideas, collected by a lifelong dilettante.

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Late, quaint notions of academic freedom and free speech

It’s not just under threat at the University of Missouri and other American campuses. The 1960s radical feminist Germaine Greer, who said some things the transgender lobby doesn’t like, was recently disinvited by Cardiff University in Wales even though she was scheduled to speak on another topic.

As Jamie Palmer notes in a lovely new Australian-based free speech blog, Quillette, it’s not just students demanding “safe spaces” who are the problem, but the academic establishment fomenting the hysteria:

“The tyranny of confirmation bias and the fanaticism of its enforcers are not only a disaster for academics themselves, who are producing unreadable jargon-filled agitprop dressed up as disinterested study and childishly censorious articles . . . It is also a disaster for their students who are being denied an education that opens their minds and broadens their ability to think critically about the value of ideas, whatever their provenance on the political spectrum.”

At Spiked Online, American feminist and free speech advocate Wendy Kaminer returns to the zealous Missouri media professor, Melissa Click, whom Kaminer writes is among the “fortysomething” academics inflaming witch hunts all over the country: 

“Click teaches mass media. Her research focuses on ‘popular-culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture’, according to her staff-profile page. ‘Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy.’ You might think that media literacy would require some study of press freedom. But the aptly named Professor Click’s current research includes studies of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey readers’ and ‘the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga’.”

These are, as has been written elsewhere, political activists and cultural cranks masquerading as academics. It’s getting impossibly hard to take them, and the movements they have spawned seriously. But their outrage has university officials absolutely petrified, and the more these crackpots get their way, the worse it gets. 

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“Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others.

“It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement.”

-- Jonathan Chait, NY mag

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“Hauling a boat ashore at Honfleur” -- Claude Monet, 1864

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‘After you win a culture war, free speech is a nuisance’

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic absolutely nails the sad state of the humorless college campus, where many of today’s top comedians -- including Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld -- will not perform due to so-called “trigger warnings” from offended students. 

She says it’s not really their fault; after all, they’re “the inheritors of 30 years of identity politics” that have rendered even non-offensive, robust discussion of race, gender and sexuality off-limits for more than professional funmeisters:

“These young people have decided that some subjects—among them rape and race—are so serious that they shouldn’t be fodder for comics. They want a world that’s less cruel; they want to play a game that isn’t rigged in favor of the powerful. And it’s their student-activities money, after all—they have every right to hire the exact type of entertainment that matches their beliefs. Still, there’s always a price to pay for walling off discussion of certain thoughts and ideas. Drive those ideas underground, especially the dark ones, and they fester.”

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“We are living in the darkest time I have ever known”

Sir Salman Rushdie believes if he had published “The Satanic Verses” now, fellow writers would not have defended him against the Iranian fatwa that forced him to live in fear and occasionally in hiding for years. 

He lashed out when more than 200 accomplished, mostly American and English-language writers protested PEN America for giving a courage award to Charlie Hebdo. In January, Islamic extremists murdered 12 staffers of the French satirical magazine in their Paris offices, including cartoonists who drew what were considered blasphemous renderings of Muslim clerics. 

Rushdie called the six writers who withdrew table sponsorships for the PEN awards dinner “pussies,” then apologized. But few high-profile writers have sided with him in a truly devastating blow against the idea of free speech.

This is exactly why PEN, in the U.S. and around the world, exists. (If you care about this at all, consider joining; an advocate membership costs $50 a year.)

PEN leaders admirably stood by their decision, but some severe damage has been done. It may be irreparable.

Unlike Rushdie, the protesters, including “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau, have risked little to write and express themselves how they please. They’ve suffered no financial punishments and certainly not had their lives or personal safety placed on the line.

At the PEN awards dinner, Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Gerard Biard got a standing ovation when he said that “Being shocked is part of the democratic debate. Being shot is not.”

But that’s a sentiment lost on the 200 or so petitioning writers, whose names include some of the luminaries of contemporary letters, many whose work I once admired but no more:

Russell Banks

Eric Bogosian

Peter Carey

Teju Cole

Michael Cunningham

Junot Diaz

Deborah Eisenberg

Eve Ensler

Frances FitzGerald

Janet Malcolm

Rick Moody

Lorrie Moore

Joyce Carol Oates

Michael Ondaatje

Francine Prose

Jeff Sharlet

Wallace Shawn

Charles Simic

There are many more, and they are weasels, every last one of them. The rationale for their protests has been aptly called in a Nick Cohen piece for The Spectator in the UK “the literary indulgence of murder.” More Cohen: 

“When I read the literary attacks on PEN’s award to Hebdo, I wondered whether it was worth staying on the middle-class left. Prose’s piece on its own was enough to make me leave in disgust. It seems a corrupted, cowardly, lying and selfish movement bereft on any spirit of camaraderie; and dishonest to its bones.”

That’s rather charitable I think. 

Charlie Hebdo editors are no longer drawing cartoons of Mohammed, saying they’ve proven their principle that anyone can draw anything.

Maybe so, but it came at a very deep cost, via deadly methods that have proven to be terribly effective. 

And aided by the gutlessness of a sated, insulated Western literary elite.

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Great for summer chillin’ listening. What a great sound! 

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‘It’s time to quit rallying around a flag that divides.’

Drive-By-Truckers bandleader Patterson Hood penned this in The New York Times just as the Confederate battle flag was set to come down over the South Carolina state capitol on Friday:

“If we want to truly honor our Southern forefathers, we should do it by moving on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity, the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them. It’s time to study and learn about who we are and where we came from while finding a way forward without the baggage of our ancestors’ fears and superstitions.”

Former Virginia Tech professor William Davis agrees that the flag was the wrong symbol to tout the full range of Southern history. But by all means, he writes in The Wall Street Journal, don’t banish Confederate memorials altogether. Their historical legacies need to be fully understood for future generations:

“In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.”

. . . . . . . . 

“American democracy is ever-changing, a constantly evolving work in progress. We shall be fortunate if it remains ever thus, but we need to remember our entire past in all its dimensions to inform the process and keep it alive. Ossification is the first step on the road to extinction for great ideas.”

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Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

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“It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time.”

James Salter

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The conservative origins of the gay marriage movement

Andew Sullivan was (and still is) reviled by the gay left for many things, most notably being a conservative who supported Ronald Reagan. 

In 1989, he earned the derision of the gay establishment for making one of the most sweeping, and vocal, arguments in favor of same-sex marriage. 

As Sullivan wrote at the time: 

“Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical. Marriage, for them, is co-optation into straight society. For the Stonewall generation, it is hard to see how this vision of conflict will ever fundamentally change. But for many other gays—my guess, a majority—while they don't deny the importance of rebellion 20 years ago and are grateful for what was done, there's now the sense of a new opportunity. A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong. To be gay and to be bourgeois no longer seems such an absurd proposition. Certainly since AIDS, to be gay and to be responsible has become a necessity.”

On Friday, not long after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, Sullivan responded in a one-time-only revival of his dormant blog, The Dish. Unlike other liberals and progressives who were positively gloating and smugly denouncing religious conservatives, Sullivan was grateful and humbled, respectfully rejoicing the full victory of an intellectual question he raised that became part of an astonishingly successful political and legal campaign.

And he couldn’t help but point out, again, the opposition from within gay ranks, and how a Democratic president advanced discriminatory practices:

“In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform; two thirds of the country were opposed; the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time. Our allies deserted us. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. For his part, president George W. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. Those were dark, dark days.”

This seems like a different America, only a couple of decades or so ago. 

And it was. I’m a bit older than Sullivan, a late-stage Baby Boomer, and even a dozen years ago this scenario didn’t seem possible. 

But as those who bop around proclaiming themselves the holders of “correct” ideas (and I consider myself fairly liberal), keep in mind they’re celebrating the inclusion of gays into one of the most conservative -- generic, small “c” -- institutions in America: Marriage. 

Along with the reversal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, another creation of Clintonian politics, it’s been a good couple of years for gay conservatism. 

Of course, any such references are being scrubbed off and dressed up as something else, shrouded in a rainbow motif. 

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Remembering Saul Bellow at 100

On the centenary of the Nobel laureate’s birth, David Mikics declares Saul Bellow nothing less than “the greatest American novelist since Faulkner.”

Writing at The Tablet, Mikics mourns how quiet this 100th birthday celebration has been, especially in a culture in which Bellow’s private life and conservative sentiments are clearly out of fashion.

As a novelist who was the classic embodiment of the modern American Jewish search for identity, Bellow has come to represent a characteristic quite to the contrary: 

“Personality, which Bellow constantly praises, is now in eclipse. Instead, we have identity. Americans are mad for identity, since this is a country in which, we have always been told, you can become whatever you want. We have been trained to wrap ourselves proudly in the signifiers of our choice. We ‘identify as’ transgender, mixed-race, Jewish, Hispanic. We can make ourselves interesting, we think, by putting on a style, a stance, an identity: We are what we wear, how we look, what we buy, what we Tweet.

Identity choice is now part of us, mostly thanks to the social-media industrial complex that would have appalled Bellow had he lived to see it. Personality, Bellow teaches, can tell who you are in a way that social identity cannot. Personality is one of a kind. There is only one Humboldt, one Herzog, one Ravelstein. Whoever you are, there is only one you.”

 Mikics adds that for Bellow, his Jewishness “was simply a fact of life, something to be grateful for rather than to be puzzled over.”

What a tragedy it is that his voice, and hard-headed but humane sentiment, isn’t just not heeded these days. They are virtually unknown.

[wendyparker-blog]

‘Nail polish does not a woman make’

Elinor Burkett, an aging liberal Baby Boomer, lays out a laundry list of traditional feminist grievances that have emerged to counter certain elements of the transgender movement.  The recent revelation of Caitlyn (nee Bruce) Jenner pushed her over the top: 

“The insult and outright fear that trans men and women live with is all too familiar to us, and a cruelly marginalized group’s battle for justice is something we instinctively want to rally behind.

“But as the movement becomes mainstream, it’s growing harder to avoid asking pointed questions about the frequent attacks by some trans leaders on women’s right to define ourselves, our discourse and our bodies. After all, the trans movement isn’t simply echoing African-Americans, Chicanos, gays or women by demanding an end to the violence and discrimination, and to be treated with a full measure of respect. It’s demanding that women reconceptualize ourselves.”

And this: 

“The struggle to move beyond such stereotypes is far from over, and trans activists could be women’s natural allies moving forward. So long as humans produce X and Y chromosomes that lead to the development of penises and vaginas, almost all of us will be “assigned” genders at birth. But what we do with those genders — the roles we assign ourselves, and each other, based on them — is almost entirely mutable.”

Stand by for push back on this. There most certainly will be plenty to come.

The always nasty, snarky and insulting Amanda Marcotte has already dug in.

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"If we forget the past, we will repeat the need for sacrifice."

So said Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., at today’s Memorial Day remembrance at the National WWI Museum in Kansas City. 

For some reason I’ve become particularly intrigued by the stories of American sacrifice during World War I, which for the United States forces lasted a little more than a year.  But more than 116,000 American troops lost their lives in 1917 and 1918, trailing only World War II and the Civil War. 

The Great War, as it was generally called, thrust the United States onto a larger, more imperialistic stage, generated bombastic patriotism and prompted anti-freedom actions such as the Espionage Act.

What had been a small military force -- led by the Marines, who were the best organized, trained and equipped at the time -- grew into the world’s largest, a distinction that remains today. 

As Matthew Davenport writes at Salon, the American doughboys who cut their teeth at Cantigny paved the way for the ultimate defeat of Germany and the rise of the powerful, modern U.S. military machine that exists today, in spite of their continuing obscurity:

“Through the 1920s and ‘30s, ‘Cantigny’ remained a symbol of American sacrifice and triumph, a uniting emblem that finally exorcised the dividing demons of the Civil War in a way the Spanish-American War never could. But then came Pearl Harbor. And D-Day. And the Bulge. And in the wake of these epochal events, the 1st Division’s attack at Cantigny lapsed into footnotes, its story left to slumber for a century.”

That’s from Davenport’s newly released book, “First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America’s First Battle of World War I.”

As World War I centenary observations continue, in Europe and North America, perhaps no single writer has done more in recent years to remember fallen American soldiers than Richard Rubin.  Two years ago he published “The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War.” He interviewed some of the last surviving American veterans of that war, and has devotedly kept stories of their service and sacrifice alive. 

I’ve found at least three articles in The New York Times just within the last year about all this. Two are haunting travel-related pieces, about the remains of the war -- from mine craters, trenches, pill boxes and bones -- to other American artifacts, markers and monuments tucked away in the remote French countryside.  Perhaps most impressive of all, and fully appropriate on another Memorial Day, is Rubin’s tour of American World War I cemeteries, which are “among the most magnificent public spaces you will ever behold.”

The vast, sweeping grounds at Aisne-Marne, Belleau Wood, Cantigny, Meuse-Argonne, Oise-Aigne and St. Mihiel -- where thousands of doughboys lay at rest -- may not be known to those steeped in the lore of World War II burial places. As Rubin writes, lovingly, of these long lost, seemingly forgotten souls: 

“The war happened a hundred years ago and four thousand miles away; and beyond that, it was so, well, great, in every conceivable metric, that it can seem impossible to grasp. You hear things — nearly a million men fell just at Verdun in 1916; in four years, the combatant nations suffered a total of 40 million dead, missing, and wounded; more than 116,000 Americans died in just 19 months; billions of shells and bullets were fired; the map of the entire world was forever redrawn — and you can’t help but wonder: What can I possibly make of this? How do I even begin?”

One can at least begin by taking out some time today, and whenever possible, and learn a little bit about the men who remain Over There.

Start here, at the National World War I Museum website, and take it from there.

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The death of the idea of a liberal education

At Columbia University – yes, the one that’s in the Ivy League – some students are objecting to having to learn Ovid, since he wrote about a rape.

Not just any old rape, but the Rape of Persephone, one of the enduring classical tales of the Greek classics, and the subject of dozens of artistic covers for centuries, including the famous Pieter Paul Rubens painting. Four undergraduate students published an op-ed in the Columbia newspaper asserting the following about Ovid's Metamorphosis:

“…like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.

“These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.”

This is nothing less than Literature Fascism, University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne responded in an essay at The New Republic: 

“It’s time for students to learn that Life is Triggering. Once they leave college, they’ll be constantly exposed to views that challenge or offend them. There are a lot of jerks out there, and no matter what your politics are, a lot of people will have the opposite view. If you’re an atheist, you’ll live in a world of people whom you see as hostile and delusional believers. If you’re a believer, you’ll encounter vociferous heathens like me. If you’re a feminist, well, sexism is alive and well.”

What is the point of an education, any education, Ivy League or otherwise, if not but to break out of the cocoon of one’s background? To stretch that small, finite world, in ways that only uncomfortable ideas can? 

To ask such questions now, in such an atmosphere of absurdity that’s already being given far too much uncritical credence, seems just as tragic as it is quaint.

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Without a sense of freedom there is no art.

Indian filmmaker Mira Nair 

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The death of the idea of freedom of speech

You’d like to believe that novelists, authors, writers -- people who live, and sometimes have died, for the notion of unfettered expression -- would have applauded the decision by PEN America to honor the assassinated cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with a first-ever courage award.  PEN America is a branch of an international organization that has defended writers, artists, journalists, intellectuals, anyone who has dared to speak up for anything, no matter how controversial or offensive.

When six writers cancelled their plans to have tables at next week’s PEN America gala honors dinner, and more than 150 others signed a letter of protest against the Charlie Hebdo designation, it revealed something rather disgusting, if not exactly new: 

For some writers and intellectuals, especially those with a hardline ideological bent, freedom of expression is conditional. 

The signatories include Joyce Carol Oates, and follow the disgusting remarks by “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau against the 10 slaughtered Charlie Hebdo accusers, whom he accused of “punching down” against marginalized Muslims in French society. 

But the PEN protestors, like Trudeau, misunderstand what Charlie Hedbo was lampooning. It’s not Muslims in general, but a draconian anti-freedom, anti-female version of Islam that anyone in a free society should deplore. 

Instead, the writers -- most from America, and well-established in the literary and intellectual circles of New York and beyond -- blamed the victims for inciting a terrible terrorist attack in the heart of Paris in January.

Charlie Hebdo lampooned all organized religion and other sacred cows of French, Western Middle Eastern civilization, quite often in poor taste. That’s not the point.

Salman Rushdie lashed out at the PEN protest, as expected. One of the best responses came in The Spectator in the U.K. from Nick Cohen, in a post entitled “Charlie Hebdo: The literary indulgence of murder.”

The text is just as devastating as the masterful headline: 

They not only go along with the terrorists from the religious ultra-right but with every state that uses Islam to maintain its power. They can show no solidarity with gays in Iran, bloggers in Saudi Arabia and persecuted women and religious minorities across the Middle East, who must fight theocracy. They have no understanding that enemies of Charlie Hebdo are also the enemies of liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims in the West. In the battle between the two, they have in their stupidity and malice allied with the wrong side.

Most glaringly they have failed to understand power. It is not fixed but fluid. It depends on where you stand. The unemployed terrorist with the gun is more powerful than the Parisian cartoonist cowering underneath his desk. The marginal cleric may well face racism and hatred – as my most liberal British Muslim friends do – but when he sits in a Sharia court imposing misogynist rules on Muslim women in the West, he is no longer a victim or potential victim but a man to be feared.

Writers who understand the power of state oppression also came down on the side of Charlie Hebdo, with real-world experience that their mostly American poseurs -- who’ve risked nothing -- may never understand. Here’s Russian-American writer Masha Gessen, who’s felt the boot of Vladimir Putin’s noxious regime, more than once: 

I don’t know if the cartoons are racist, and I don’t know whom they offend, how, or why. I lack the cultural understanding to make these judgments—and so does anyone else who is not a regular consumer of French media.

And you know what? It doesn’t matter. The staff of Charlie Hebdo has suffered the greatest crime against free speech committed in recent memory. The magazine continues to face a grave threat. 

True to its rebellious (and decidedly left-wing) roots, a Charlie Hebdo staffer is planning to launch a version in the Ukraine, where Putin is waging a military coup he routinely denies. 

Those who insist on the right ferret out the truth, or simply mock the pomposities of those in power, need to counter the appalling cowardice of the PEN protestors.

[wendyparker-blog]

I was freed not by propagandists but by composers, novelists, and poets who spoke to me of more interesting and freer ways of life."

Ralph Ellison