Book: A History of the American People
Jeff Mott
Johnson, but there seems to be some criticism surrounding this book and
I'm looking for more opinions. One of my concerns is the author
possibly painting a biased view of American history. While skimming
through it at a library I noticed very little of colonists and early
America's treatment of Native Americans. The internment camps for
Japanese Americans during WWII also seems to be missing entirely. While
I'm not looking for an anti-American book that will find any excuse to
point out flaws, I also don't want one that will ignore blemishes
through history.
Any other reviews or opinions?
Francis A. Miniter
Here is a comment about the author and the book. As you say, it seems to be
very controversial.
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/pjohnson.html
Francis A. Miniter
Jack Campin - bogus address
> Johnson, but there seems to be some criticism surrounding this book and
> I'm looking for more opinions. One of my concerns is the author
> possibly painting a biased view of American history. While skimming
> through it at a library I noticed very little of colonists and early
> America's treatment of Native Americans. The internment camps for
> Japanese Americans during WWII also seems to be missing entirely. While
> I'm not looking for an anti-American book that will find any excuse to
> point out flaws, I also don't want one that will ignore blemishes
> through history.
Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", maybe?
============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
Michael
Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", maybe?
*******
Oh yeah. No chance of running into a "biased view of American
history" in Zinn's book.
Michael
Michael
Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", maybe?
***************
Oh yeah. Surely no danger of running into a "biased view of American
history" from Zinn.
Just teasing, Jack.
Michael
Bruce McGuffin
> Jeff Mott wrote:
>
> > I am considering purchasing "A History of the American People" by Paul
> > Johnson, but there seems to be some criticism surrounding this book and
> > I'm looking for more opinions. One of my concerns is the author
> > possibly painting a biased view of American history. While skimming
> > through it at a library I noticed very little of colonists and early
> > America's treatment of Native Americans. The internment camps for
> > Japanese Americans during WWII also seems to be missing entirely. While
> > I'm not looking for an anti-American book that will find any excuse to
> > point out flaws, I also don't want one that will ignore blemishes
> > through history.
> > Any other reviews or opinions?
I read Johnson's history of the 20th Century (Modern Times) and it
definitely promotes a particular conservative point of view. I paired
it with a book on the history of communist Russia (I forget the title)
that was somewhat apologist, and think between the two I got a fair
account of Russia in the 20th century. The two books didn't contradict
each other, they just had different emphases, and occasionally one
would leave out something the other found significant. Johnson was no
worse than the other author, and more honest about his bias.
That said, in terms of it's historical impact, I don't think the
internment of Japanese Americans in WWII was a big deal. I wouldn't
expect a book covering 200 or 300 years of history to give it more
than a paragraph.
Bruce
Michael
I read Johnson's history of the 20th Century (Modern Times) and it
definitely promotes a particular conservative point of view. I paired
it with a book on the history of communist Russia (I forget the title)
that was somewhat apologist, and think between the two I got a fair
account of Russia in the 20th century. The two books didn't contradict
each other, they just had different emphases, and occasionally one
would leave out something the other found significant. Johnson was no
worse than the other author, and more honest about his bias.
***************
Thank you for the review, Bruce. I wasn't familiar with Johnson, so
I checked out a few of his books on Amazon. He seems to get some
fairly good reviews in spite of his conservative stance.
Thanks again, Michael
Bob
I commend you on your open-mindedness!
(After it's been open for a while you might want to reconsider the "in
spite of".)
wer...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
> Michael wrote:
>> Bruce wrote
>>> Johnson's history of the 20th Century (Modern Times) definitely
>>> promotes a particular conservative point of view....
>> unfamiliar with Johnson, I checked him out on Amazon.
>> He gets some fairly good reviews in spite of his conservative stance.
> I commend you on your open-mindedness! (After it's been open for a
> while you might want to reconsider the "in spite of".)
<smile> and here I was thinking that/how Michael (and Bruce)
"hit the nail on the head" with their observations...
ah, the world is funny like that sometimes.
--
This ._. ASCII... ._.
is /v\ on Usenet /v\ There
USEnet /( )\ ANYTHING ELSE /( )\ you are
^^ ^^ IS BLOAT !! ^^ ^^ then...
David Loftus
All right, but to ignore it entirely? I wonder how Johnson treats
slavery?
If you're interested in a fairly short but broad and readable survey of
relations between Native Americans and the white invaders (definite
liberal bias in this one), I recommend Peter Matthiessen's _Indian
Country_.
I read it under the rather odd conditions of riding the overnight train
from Dakar, Senegal to Bamako, Mali, back in the summer of 1989. The
book, along with somebody's boom box in the next seat playing Peter
Gabriel's "Biko" a few times, brought me to tears.
David Loftus
screwth...@gmail.com
Actually, the best approach might be to read Zinn's book *and* A
History of the American People, and synthesize your own view. No view
on history is going to be without bias.
Bruce McGuffin
Does he? I wouldn't take missing a short paragraph or page "while
skimming through it at a library" to say anything about is presence or
absence. Ditto no index citation or TOC entry.
> I wonder how Johnson treats
> slavery?
I expect he treats it as the great political issue in the formation of
the US and its laws between 1783 and 1865. The Japanese internment
just didn't have the same significance.
>
> If you're interested in a fairly short but broad and readable survey of
> relations between Native Americans and the white invaders (definite
> liberal bias in this one), I recommend Peter Matthiessen's _Indian
> Country_.
>
> I read it under the rather odd conditions of riding the overnight train
> from Dakar, Senegal to Bamako, Mali, back in the summer of 1989. The
> book, along with somebody's boom box in the next seat playing Peter
> Gabriel's "Biko" a few times, brought me to tears.
I had the same experience watching the movie Armageddon on a flight
from Delhi to NY. Serious sleep deprivation will do that to you.
Bruce
Michael
I commend you on your open-mindedness!
(After it's been open for a while you might want to reconsider the "in
spite of".)
***************************
You think it's closed-minded of me to think that reviews of con-
servative thought usually involve the word "racist" and the always
insightful "stupid?"
Michael
Bob
I'm having trouble following that. Do you think the reviews are correct in
characterizing conservatives as "racist" and "stupid"? Your original
message implied some negative connotation on your part. (The book might be
worth reading "in spite of" its conservative orientation.) Or did I
misread your original message?
Richard Harter
You misread it as did I originally. The original remark implied that
reviews commonly give negative reviews of works of conservative
thought. In other words reviewers typically have an anti-conservative
bias. Since the work in question got good reviews it must have been
exceptionally good.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
The eternal revolution has its needs - its slogans to be chanted,
its demonstrations to be held, its children to eat.
frisbie...@yahoo.com
Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:
> > I am considering purchasing "A History of the American People" by Paul
> > Johnson, but there seems to be some criticism surrounding this book and
> > I'm looking for more opinions. One of my concerns is the author
> > possibly painting a biased view of American history. While skimming
> > through it at a library I noticed very little of colonists and early
> > America's treatment of Native Americans. The internment camps for
> > Japanese Americans during WWII also seems to be missing entirely. While
> > I'm not looking for an anti-American book that will find any excuse to
> > point out flaws, I also don't want one that will ignore blemishes
> > through history.
>
> Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", maybe?
>
I'm as liberal as they come, but found Zinn's book to be an
embarrassment. The thesis is that everything the government of the US
has ever done is evil. Well, how does he explain the foundation of the
Republican Party, which was based on opposition to slavery? Simple: he
never mentions it.
Michael
I'm having trouble following that. Do you think the reviews are correct
in
characterizing conservatives as "racist" and "stupid"? Your original
message implied some negative connotation on your part. (The book might
be
worth reading "in spite of" its conservative orientation.) Or did I
misread your original message?
*************
Sorry, Bob. The "in spite of" was meant as recognition that a
conservative text rarely receives favorable reviews, not that
they don't deserve it. It was not meant as a denigration of the
conservative view.
Michael
Bob
Well, sorry then! I misread your original post.
Bob
Bruce Scott TOK
>embarrassment. The thesis is that everything the government of the US
>has ever done is evil. Well, how does he explain the foundation of the
>Republican Party, which was based on opposition to slavery? Simple: he
>never mentions it.
Maybe then you can recommend an alternate to Zinn's review of the
history of the common people's resistance to elite measures. Much of
our history is assembled from that struggle between them that have and
them that have to pay rent. It started when the soldiers who fought and
died to win our independence came home and found they'd got cheated out
of the financial support they'd been promised so they could rebuild
(and if there was no money why didn't they get support `in kind'?).
Most people would like to edit all that out of our history. Zinn
didn't, and so he appears ``biased.'' Funny, no one ever said that
about all those history books which conveniently neglected to inform us
how many times our fellow Americans have been shot down, and by whom.
In European countries these things are taught within the mainstream. In
Germany full length attention is given to the many peasant uprisings and
their causes and their fate (i.e., not just the stuff in the 20th
Century). We don't get anything like the depth of this in the US. Not
even from such historians as William McNiell.
Paul Johnson is a shrill ideologue, and yet you don't hear so many
people calling him ``biased.'' So I wouldn't put any value on that
term, actually.
So how about telling us your alternative sources?
--
ciao,
Bruce
drift wave turbulence: http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bds/
Bruce Scott TOK
``Anti Americanism is Racist Envy'' by Paul Johnson (Forbes, 21 Jul 2003)
That's BS of course, but I don't hear ``conservatives'' taking _him_ to
task for using that word. Maybe Michael can give us some examples.
Bob
For all I know Paul Johnson *is* a racist -- I am not familiar with him or
his work. I was only objecting to (what I mistakenly read as) the claim
that he must be a racist *because* he is a conservative.
I don't take anyone to task for simply using the word racist. I am sure
that racist attitudes, actions, speech, etc., exist and there are recists
responsible.
But I would give Johnson the benefit of the doubt if the only evidence I
see of his racism is name-calling and inuendo. And, if Johnson claims that
there is Anti-Americanism fueled by racism and envy, well, he may be
right. And his Forbes article might have a reasonble discussion of why he
thinks as he does.
Bob
Michael
Maybe Michael can give us some examples.
****************
You want examples of liberals accusing conservatives of being racist?
Michael
wer...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
>Jack Campin wrote:
>>>..."A History of the American People" by Paul Johnson...
>>> I'm looking for opinions, criticism...?!? is the author painting a
>>> biased view of American history? I noticed very little of colonists
>>> and early America's treatment of Native Americans. Internment camps
>>> during WWII also seems to be missing entirely. While not looking for
>>> an anti-American book that will find any excuse to point out flaws,
>>> I also don't want one that will ignore blemishes through history.
>> Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", maybe?
> I'm as liberal as they come, but found Zinn's book to be an embarrassment.
Don't! Maybe you expected a "balanced view" and presentation where Zinn
felt mostly a need to balance the one-sided presentations in most other
publications (I suspect as one possibility). Didn't his comments include
hints to that effect?!?
> The thesis is that everything the government of the US has ever done is
> evil.
you mean as in "politics is dirty business, but somebody's got to do it" ?!?
well, it's a bit like feeling one doesn't have to say much to/about someone
or something one agrees with, it's "the others" one can't say enough about...
(USEnet, for example, is based mostly on controversy also, not on people
agreeing with each other. it would be pretty dull and quiet... ;-)
i.e. I might be more in agreement with you than it seems, but what I feel a
need to comment is a possible caveat, not that I agree... :)
> Well, how does he explain the foundation of the Republican Party, which
> was based on opposition to slavery? Simple: he never mentions it.
I notice that you did not provide a reference documenting that *fact* either.
what am I to make of that...?!? (don't forget the foundations of the other
major party, you wouldn't want to be called on leaving something major out
in your presentations... ;-)
Bruce Scott TOK
No, examples of conservatives taking Johnson to task for using the
Racist label. The anti-American label is silly enough given the fact
that most people Johnson and his fans apply that to are pro-American and
anti-Bush.
You wouldn't believe how pro-American this country is over here. It is
quite amazing really. Especially given how we've treated them. Of
course the people here are far more mature about telling the difference
between a people and their government than some of the others we've all
heard about. And people only slightly older than me remember Kennedy in
Berlin like it was yesterday.
You should have seen how Rice treated Merkel in their press conference.
Quite unbelievable. Such smarmy patronizing. Bush I never behaved like
that. If some foreign leader came over to the US and treated our
highest officials like that we'd see the media (not to mention the cable
channel louts) up in arms over it for months.
So yeah, Paul Johnson's article is quite a screech. Realitaetsfern, as
they would say over here.
Bob
> Michael wrote:
>>Bruce wrote:
>>
>>Maybe Michael can give us some examples.
>>
>>****************
>>You want examples of liberals accusing conservatives of being racist?
>
> No, examples of conservatives taking Johnson to task for using the Racist
> label.
Would you like examples of liberals using the Racist (sic) label?
Most recent (big) example I can think of is Senator Kennedy calling Judge
Alito racist -- then skipping the testimony of Alito's black colleague
(Judge Timothy Lewis) who, among others, testified on his behalf.
Other examples are too numerous to mention. It's a virtual mantra for
liberals.
Bob
Michael
Most recent (big) example I can think of is Senator Kennedy calling
Judge
Alito racist -- then skipping the testimony of Alito's black colleague
(Judge Timothy Lewis) who, among others, testified on his behalf.
Other examples are too numerous to mention. It's a virtual mantra for
liberals.
*****************
I agree. There is a TV in our coffee mess/kitchen at work and the
Alito
hearing has been airing for the past few days. Although I usually try
to avoid the obvious shots, there were several other people that passed
through the break room that thought the idea of Ted Kennedy questioning
anybody's ethics was borderline ludicrous.
There is plenty for a conservative to dislike in John and Robert
Kennedy,
but for some, me included, there is also a certain amount of respect
for what they accomplished. Ted Kennedy, on the other hand, appears
to me as a total embarrassment to the liberal cause.
Michael
annika
Michael wrote:
> Bob wrote:
> Most recent (big) example I can think of is Senator Kennedy calling
> Judge
> Alito racist -- then skipping the testimony of Alito's black colleague
> (Judge Timothy Lewis) who, among others, testified on his behalf.
>
> Other examples are too numerous to mention. It's a virtual mantra for
> liberals.
>
> *****************
> I agree.
With what? Surely, Lewis' testimony says nothing about whether Alito's a
racist. When it comes to Supreme Court justices, manners and convictions
are entirely besides the point -- the only thing that counts are effects.
frisbie...@yahoo.com
Bruce Scott TOK wrote:
> >I'm as liberal as they come, but found Zinn's book to be an
> >embarrassment. The thesis is that everything the government of the US
> >has ever done is evil. Well, how does he explain the foundation of the
> >Republican Party, which was based on opposition to slavery? Simple: he
> >never mentions it.
>
> Maybe then you can recommend an alternate to Zinn's review of the
> history of the common people's resistance to elite measures.
I sure can. Hernando De Soto's "The Mystery of Capital." The second
half of the book is a history of land ownership in the US. It's great.
amc...@gmail.com
gusto and style, and seems to make good sense, most of the time. I
have only a limited knowledge of American history (I'm Australian), but
I certainly enjoyed Johnson's take on it. He probably leaves lots out,
but what book doesn't? Borrow it from your library and look it over,
and decide yourself if it's a book for you. If not, there are plenty
of others!
-A.
Richard Harter
I will second the recommendation. I haven't read Zinn's book, but I
fancy that he has a restricted notion of "the common people".
Michael
In European countries these things are taught within the mainstream.
In
Germany full length attention is given to the many peasant uprisings
and
their causes and their fate (i.e., not just the stuff in the 20th
Century).
**************
I'm doubtful, Bruce. I've heard from a half-dozen travelers (one a
German descendant) that the German activities in World War II
are verboten in Germany. I'm not blaming them for not wanting
to dredge up the atrocities, but I totally disagree with your
suggestion that other countries are more mindful of their shortfalls
than the United States. I cannot think of another country that is
more self-consciously self-critical.
Michael
M J Carley
>I will second the recommendation. I haven't read Zinn's book, but I
>fancy that he has a restricted notion of "the common people".
Since he doesn't talk about `the common people', it hardly matters. He
does what he aims to do: give a history of the US from the point of
view of people who are usually neglected. He's good on things like
Shay's rebellion, trade unions and the anti-imperialist movements, for
example.
--
Differenza fra il rivoluzionaro e il cialtrone. Il rivoluzionario
rompe l'orologio e invece di presentarsi alle nove si presenta alle
nove meno cinque. Il cialtrone rompe l'orologio e si alza alle undici.
Home page: http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
M J Carley
>I'm doubtful, Bruce. I've heard from a half-dozen travelers (one a
>German descendant) that the German activities in World War II are
>verboten in Germany. I'm not blaming them for not wanting to dredge
>up the atrocities, but I totally disagree with your suggestion that
>other countries are more mindful of their shortfalls than the United
>States.
I can't think of a country that tells itself the truth about itself:
try talking about what Britain really did to its imperial subjects or
what France did in Algeria or mention Ballyseedy in Ireland, for example.
>I cannot think of another country that is more self-consciously
>self-critical.
If you mean the US, you are joking? As for Germany, it has now come to
the point of young people reacting against the way they have been
taught about Germany's crimes.
smw
Michael wrote:
> Bruce wrote:
>
> In European countries these things are taught within the mainstream.
> In
> Germany full length attention is given to the many peasant uprisings
> and
> their causes and their fate (i.e., not just the stuff in the 20th
> Century).
>
> **************
> I'm doubtful, Bruce. I've heard from a half-dozen travelers (one a
> German descendant) that the German activities in World War II
> are verboten in Germany.
That's utterly absurd. Teaching about them starts in elementary school
and continues uninterrupted in any class where it makes remotely sense
throughout highschool.
And what do you think is that field of stelae doing in the heart of
Berlin?
I'm not blaming them for not wanting
> to dredge up the atrocities,
Well, that's ever so nice of you, but dredging up WWII atrocities is the
main business of German history, and a task German culture has
shouldered with gusto, be it in literature, film, painting, social
sciences, humanities, public memorialization, etc etc. You couldn't be
more off.
Bruce Scott TOK
>On 15 Jan 2006 04:03:51 -0800, frisbie...@yahoo.com wrote:
>>I sure can. Hernando De Soto's "The Mystery of Capital." The second
>>half of the book is a history of land ownership in the US. It's great.
I've heard of this and will check it out next time in the US.
>I will second the recommendation. I haven't read Zinn's book, but I
>fancy that he has a restricted notion of "the common people".
Sure. I can guess where you've got that impression.
Bruce Scott TOK
Firstly, in my experience travelers aren't much use. Talk to people who
live here. The transition takes about 5 years, a bit longer for some, a
bit less for others.
Secondly, ``the German activities in World War II'' are discussed so
extensively as to be impossible to avoid. Of course, I find the whole
thing very interesting. Especially so since (early 1990s) I understand
the language. Two major movies have been made about the end of the war
in the last two years. Interviews with people like Hitler's
secretaries, people from the US/UK directly involved in the war crimes
trials, clear statements about the resposibilities of people like Keitel
and Jodl, etc, taken in the 1970s/80s are regularly re-broadcast. No
country on this earth does a better job examining the more uncomfortable
parts of its history.
Your travellers are way, way off the mark. I wouldn't recommend their
advice for anything.
Richard Harter
<Use-Author-Supplied-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>Richard Harter wrote:
>
>>On 15 Jan 2006 04:03:51 -0800, frisbie...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>>>I sure can. Hernando De Soto's "The Mystery of Capital." The second
>>>half of the book is a history of land ownership in the US. It's great.
>
>I've heard of this and will check it out next time in the US.
>
>>I will second the recommendation. I haven't read Zinn's book, but I
>>fancy that he has a restricted notion of "the common people".
>
>Sure. I can guess where you've got that impression.
No doubt. So can he,and so can she, and so can any one. What do such
guesses signify other than whispers in the wind.
Michael S. Morris
Tuesday, the 17th of January, 2006
Michael:
I cannot think of another country that is more self-consciously
self-critical.
MJ Carley:
If you mean the US, you are joking? [...]
I certainly wouldn't consider that even remotely close
to a joke. I mean, except in the sense that the implied
metric of self-criticism, in which the self-criticism
of one country can be *more* than that of another, is unspecified.
I can only suppose that what you mean, MJ Carley, is some sort
of unity of mass self-loathing, which, granted, is lacking in the US.
However, US culture---as measured by books, by films, by television,
by criticism from the pulpits---is simply filled to the eyebrows
with self-criticism. There does not exist a phase of US history
without resources *commonly available to anyone and everyone*
critical of the US, and published from within American society
by Americans. I mean, forget Howard Zinn for a moment or _Lies
My Teacher Told Me_, and think of European settlement and
encroachment on Native Americans---from Dee Brown's
_Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_ to the indie hit "Billy Jack"
to the Kevin Costner film "Dances with Wolves" to Disney's
"Pocahontas" (Disney, fer chrissake!)---and you'll see American
culture permeated with the white guilt. Heck, you can even go
back to D.W. Griffith and see silent films that sounded the
same idea long before Howard Zinn was a dream in anybody's eye.
Or Melville's books (_Moby Dick_, but especially as informed
by _Typee_ and _Omoo_) long before that. For Viet-Nam, what histories
are there outside of American criticisms of the US? I can
think of Stanley Karnow's _Vietnam: A History_, the PBS "Vietnam:
A Television History", the other TV series (History Channel?)
"The 10,000 Day War", films like "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now",
"Platoon", "Coming Home", "Born on the Fourth of July".
It's simply a free-speech and free-press free-for-all.
When I lived in Canada for three years from 1990-1993, that's where
and when it really hit me how self-critical US culture really was.
Because it ain't the case that Canadian culture is very self-critical.
In fact, it is predominantly US-critical, and Canadians have developed
a set of prejudices about the US being an automatic weapons crossfire
and racist and lunatic Christian fundamentalist, which prejudices are
all about defining what it is to be Canadian, i.e. "*not* American".
George W. Bush's lack of self-criticism, or self-reflection even,
simply does not epitomize, and cannot begin to epitomize, the
real diversity---and real self-criticism---of US culture and
US society. Even an American filmmaker as mainstream as Steven
Spielberg can hardly make a film that isn't deeply based in criticism of
the US---from "Munich" to "The Terminal" to "War of the Worlds"
to "E.T.". It's dead common for the villains in any standard
Hollywood-fare "action film" to be a government or a
corporate conspiracy. Hence, the essential evilness of "corporations"
---free enterprise and corporate capitalism being defining
features of the US "constitution"---as a myth given much
wider credence in US society than probably the resurrection
of Christ is.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>I can only suppose that what you mean, MJ Carley, is some sort of
>unity of mass self-loathing, which, granted, is lacking in the US.
That is not what I mean. I also continued by saying that I don't think
there is any country honest with itself about its own past, with the
possible exception of Germany.
>However, US culture---as measured by books, by films, by television,
>by criticism from the pulpits---is simply filled to the eyebrows with
>self-criticism. There does not exist a phase of US history without
>resources *commonly available to anyone and everyone* critical of the
>US, and published from within American society by Americans. I mean,
>forget Howard Zinn for a moment or _Lies My Teacher Told Me_, and
>think of European settlement and encroachment on Native
>Americans---from Dee Brown's _Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_ to the
>indie hit "Billy Jack" to the Kevin Costner film "Dances with Wolves"
>to Disney's "Pocahontas" (Disney, fer chrissake!)---and you'll see
>American culture permeated with the white guilt. Heck, you can even
>go back to D.W. Griffith and see silent films that sounded the same
>idea long before Howard Zinn was a dream in anybody's eye.
D. W. Griffith is critical of the US?
>Or Melville's books (_Moby Dick_, but especially as informed by
>_Typee_ and _Omoo_) long before that. For Viet-Nam, what histories
>are there outside of American criticisms of the US? I can think of
>Stanley Karnow's _Vietnam: A History_, the PBS "Vietnam: A Television
>History", the other TV series (History Channel?) "The 10,000 Day
>War", films like "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now", "Platoon",
>"Coming Home", "Born on the Fourth of July".
These films are precisely not self-critical. I have seen `The Deer
Hunter', `Apocalypse Now' and `Platoon': they are extended whinges
about what a horrible time `we' had in Vietnam. They are not critical
of the US and its invasion of another country that had done it no
harm.
>George W. Bush's lack of self-criticism, or self-reflection even,
>simply does not epitomize, and cannot begin to epitomize, the
>real diversity---and real self-criticism---of US culture and
>US society. Even an American filmmaker as mainstream as Steven
>Spielberg can hardly make a film that isn't deeply based in criticism of
>the US---from "Munich" to "The Terminal" to "War of the Worlds"
>to "E.T.".
`Munich' is critical of the US? How? I haven't seen it yet, but the
reviews I've seen so far don't mention any attack on American
standards.
I don't claim that the US is unique in this: `The battle of Algiers'
was made by an Italian; British critics went ballistic over `Hidden
agenda'; there are truths you can't mention about the famine, or 1690,
or the Civil War or the First World War in Ireland. But there is no
good reason to believe that the US is self-critical.
Michael
Well, that's ever so nice of you, but dredging up WWII atrocities is
the
main business of German history, and a task German culture has
shouldered with gusto, be it in literature, film, painting, social
sciences, humanities, public memorialization, etc etc. You couldn't be
more off.
**************
I apologize for the mistake and thank you for the correcting it.
Michael
michael
> When I lived in Canada for three years from 1990-1993, that's where
> and when it really hit me how self-critical US culture really was.
> Because it ain't the case that Canadian culture is very self-critical.
> In fact, it is predominantly US-critical, and Canadians have developed
> a set of prejudices about the US being an automatic weapons crossfire
> and racist and lunatic Christian fundamentalist, which prejudices are
> all about defining what it is to be Canadian, i.e. "*not* American".
yes... and don't think that this particularly salient feature of "being
Canadian" doesn't drive some of us to wish we'd been born in the USA...
at least then our criticism of the US would amount to more than
self-serving hypocrisy... i guess people like MJ Carley prefer to
imagine that Chomsky et. al. are not "really" americans?
michael
frisbie...@yahoo.com
Another book I like is an old high-school (maybe college by now)
history book called The American Pageant. Highly educational, many
things I never knew. That the US might have invaded Cuba or Canada
before the Civil War, but the South didn't want more free states and
the North didn't want more slave states. That the idea the South went
to war over the tariff is nonsense because the amount of money involved
was tiny. Being a well-researched work it names names, dates, and
figures.
I have no use for works of "history" that ignore major events that
contradict the thesis of the author.
M J Carley
>yes... and don't think that this particularly salient feature of
>"being Canadian" doesn't drive some of us to wish we'd been born in
>the USA... at least then our criticism of the US would amount to
>more than self-serving hypocrisy... i guess people like MJ Carley
>prefer to imagine that Chomsky et. al. are not "really" americans?
Chomsky is hardly a well-known commentator who regularly reaches
millions of Americans with his critical views.
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 18th of January, 2006
M J Carley wrote:
Chomsky is hardly a well-known commentator who regularly reaches
millions of Americans with his critical views.
You just got through telling me that you *didn't* mean lockstep
universal brainwashing agreement with criticism of the US.
And now you are demanding that millions "be reached" by Chomsky
for him to be well-known. The reality is the man is very
well known---by millions of Americans---, as are his views,
and the reality also is that Chomsky is an American critic of
the US. One of many on the left. Not to mention all the many
on the right.
US culture is in a free-for-all. And it produces critics of
the US by the legion. The criticism isn't unified, is all.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Wednesday, the 18th of January, 2006
M J Carley wrote:
D. W. Griffith is critical of the US?
I thought what I said was that he is negatively critical
about the treatment of Native Americans by white American settlers.
I''ve watched some 40 or so (out of hundreds he made)
of his short films (as available on DVD). Besides being
fascinating insofar as they demonstrate the invention of
so much of filmic technique, they are also fascinating in how
they deny the "racist bugbear" interpretation of Griffith
if "Birth of a Nation" were all one knew about. Oh, yeah,
and besides stories told from (Griffith's imagined) Indian
point of view about whites raping and killing Indians, there's
the story about the jobless man with the sick wife denied
work finally resorting to crime and getting caught taking
cash from the rich man's desk drawer, which cash turns out
to be a bribe the rich man is taking in exchange for voting
a certain way on some civic board. And there's the one about
the greedy capitalist who corners corn ("and that ain't hay"),
and uses his monopoly to raise prices, causing a poor mother
and starving children to beg for bread, and, in his glee over
the wealth and power so obtained, dances around and falls
into a grain elevator and drowns in it. Like that. You know---
critical.
MJ Carley:
These films are precisely not self-critical. I have seen `The Deer
Hunter', `Apocalypse Now' and `Platoon': they are extended whinges
about what a horrible time `we' had in Vietnam. They are not critical
of the US and its invasion of another country that had done it no
harm.
You are an undiscerning dolt. A film about the horrible time "we"
had, in which the horrible time we had is connected to qualities in
us, and not something "they" perpetrated on us, is precisely
*self* critical. A depiction of Viet-Nam as a US "invasion" is
precisely a piece of idiot Marxist agitprop from the get-go.
It isn't so much "criticism" as the axiomatic assuming-away of
anything but denunciation. "The Deer Hunter" is permeated with
the cluelessness of these three blue-collar American friends
about the war they are about to fight, and which destroys
them. "Apocalypse Now" is really about the descent into madness
and hell of all war---the logical deduction from the premise
of war itself. So, in a sense, it is irrelevant that it happens
to be set in Viet Nam. However, it *is* set in Viet Nam, and
insofar as there are any historical details relevant to that
setting, every detail is critical of the U.S., serves only to
point the absurdity and the shamelessness of the facade of
US culture. "Apocalypse Now" is about becoming whatever it
is we war against. "Platoon" is of course a transcription
of _Moby Dick_, so it, too, has a more literary project
than mere political opinion-mongering. But, again,
insofar as the particular setting for the film happens to
have historical and cultural trappings, those trappings are
all negatively critical of the US. In fact, it suggests not
that we become the enemy we set out to make war upon, but that
we already *are* that enemy.
MJ Carley:
`Munich' is critical of the US? How? I haven't seen it yet, but the
reviews I've seen so far don't mention any attack on American
standards.
You've got to be kidding. "Munich" is about the Israeli
anti-terrorist response to the Olympics terrorism. Leon
Wieseltier, writing in the New Republic, says that Spielberg
goes to extremes of moral contortion in order to present
anti-terrorism on an equal moral footing with terrorism
(Israelis fighting to protect land, wives, children/Palestinians
fighting to protect land, wives, children, Palestinians
killing innocent victims, Israelis killing innocent victims,
etc., etc.). In a post 9/11 world, the idea that such a film
is *not* meant as criticism of the US "War on Terrorism"
strikes me as willful obtuseness.
MJ Carley:
I don't claim that the US is unique in this: `The battle of Algiers'
was made by an Italian; British critics went ballistic over `Hidden
agenda';
I really don't know or understand the British criticism you are
talking about. Maybe you could elaborate. I first saw Pontecorvo's
film in 1982 or 1983 at the little arts cinema in Cambridge,
England. My impression of it and of the criticism of it at the time
was astonisment and praise at so thoughtful and even-handed a
history of the French tactical victory/strategic defeat, and told with
Algerian artistic collaboration. It was more like everyone was
*expecting* mere propaganda and was surprised at how unpropagandistic
the film was. The film depicts the FLN terrorism---especially
the infamous milk bar bombing---as horrific, and it depicts
the French paras who win the battle as quite sympathetic.
Of course, they use systematic torture to uncover the FLN
terrorist cells, something they learned about from captivity
under the Viet Nimh---and torture works all the way to removing
the FLN and their stashes of bombs and their bomb-factories from
the Casbah. Which is where the film ends, in French victory. What
it does not depict, though it certainly foreshadows, is how the
French victory in the battle led to French strategic defeat---that is,
how the methods of torture employed by the paras led to a shift
in public opinion in the French democracy against the military and
against the war effort, and this in turn led to mutiny by the
military and an eventual "washing of his hands" of Algeria by
De Gaulle. And thus how the FLN, without ever winning a
single engagement at arms, murdered its way (most of the murders
were of Algerian Arabs likely to form any sort of centrist
or compromise leadership in any post-war Algeria) into absolute
power over the newly independent Algeria. It's a film about how
terrorism (as distinct from guerrilla warfare) works.
MJ Carley:
there are truths you can't mention about the famine, or 1690,
or the Civil War or the First World War in Ireland.
I of course defer to you as to what truths "you can't mention"
about Ireland. But I'll also express doubt that, whatever they
are, they haven't already been mentioned.
MJ Carley:
But there is no
good reason to believe that the US is self-critical.
On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
almost nothing but self-critical.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>M J Carley wrote:
> Chomsky is hardly a well-known commentator who regularly reaches
> millions of Americans with his critical views.
>You just got through telling me that you *didn't* mean lockstep
>universal brainwashing agreement with criticism of the US. And now
>you are demanding that millions "be reached" by Chomsky for him to be
>well-known. The reality is the man is very well known---by millions
>of Americans---, as are his views, and the reality also is that
>Chomsky is an American critic of the US. One of many on the left. Not
>to mention all the many on the right.
I'm not demanding anything. The question is whether or not criticism
(of the Chomskyan type) is typical of US culture. It isn't.
M J Carley
>MJ Carley:
> These films are precisely not self-critical. I have seen `The Deer
> Hunter', `Apocalypse Now' and `Platoon': they are extended whinges
> about what a horrible time `we' had in Vietnam. They are not
> critical of the US and its invasion of another country that had
> done it no harm.
>You are an undiscerning dolt. A film about the horrible time "we"
>had, in which the horrible time we had is connected to qualities in
>us, and not something "they" perpetrated on us, is precisely *self*
>critical. A depiction of Viet-Nam as a US "invasion" is precisely a
>piece of idiot Marxist agitprop from the get-go. It isn't so much
>"criticism" as the axiomatic assuming-away of anything but
>denunciation. "The Deer Hunter" is permeated with the cluelessness of
>these three blue-collar American friends about the war they are about
>to fight, and which destroys them.
So it's about how terrible the war was for America (40.000 dead)
rather than its effects on Vietnam (3 million dead).
>"Apocalypse Now" is really about the descent into madness and hell of
>all war---the logical deduction from the premise of war itself. So,
>in a sense, it is irrelevant that it happens to be set in Viet
>Nam. However, it *is* set in Viet Nam, and insofar as there are any
>historical details relevant to that setting, every detail is critical
>of the U.S., serves only to point the absurdity and the shamelessness
>of the facade of US culture. "Apocalypse Now" is about becoming
>whatever it is we war against.
If it is about `becoming whatever it is we war against', it is not
self-critical: that would mean that the US became whatever it was and
did not start off like that. John Pilger reports that:
Coppola claimed in his film that NLF soldiers hacked off the arms of
children to discourage a vaccination programme and implied that this
was the reason why the United States invaded Vietnam. When an
American journalist wrote to the screenwriter, John Milius, asking
where the children's severed arms story had originated, her letter
was returned by Milius with the US Special Forces death's head drawn
on it, together with these words:
We must burn them,
We must incinerate them,
Press after press,
Pen after pen,
Pencil after pencil,
- No dialogue with communist criminals
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Vietnam_Heroes.html
> MJ Carley:
>`Munich' is critical of the US? How? I haven't seen it yet, but the
>reviews I've seen so far don't mention any attack on American
>standards.
>You've got to be
>kidding. "Munich" is about the Israeli anti-terrorist response to the
>Olympics terrorism. Leon Wieseltier, writing in the New Republic,
>says that Spielberg goes to extremes of moral contortion in order to
>present anti-terrorism on an equal moral footing with terrorism
>(Israelis fighting to protect land, wives, children/Palestinians
>fighting to protect land, wives, children, Palestinians killing
>innocent victims, Israelis killing innocent victims, etc., etc.). In
>a post 9/11 world, the idea that such a film is *not* meant as
>criticism of the US "War on Terrorism" strikes me as willful
>obtuseness.
MJ Carley:
> >I don't claim that the US is unique in this: `The battle of Algiers'
> >was made by an Italian; British critics went ballistic over `Hidden
> >agenda';
>I really don't know or understand the
>British criticism you are talking about. Maybe you could elaborate.
It's about `shoot to kill' in Northern Ireland and the secret service
plot against Harold Wilson. When the film was released, it was
denounced on the grounds that `our country would never do such things'
There was a radio programme about it on Sunday, repeated tonight,
which you can get from the BBC site at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/radio4/aod.shtml?radio4/movieswithamessage
>I first saw Pontecorvo's film in 1982 or 1983 at the little arts
>cinema in Cambridge, England. My impression of it and of the
>criticism of it at the time was astonisment and praise at so
>thoughtful and even-handed a history of the French tactical
>victory/strategic defeat, and told with Algerian artistic
>collaboration. It was more like everyone was *expecting* mere
>propaganda and was surprised at how unpropagandistic the film
>was. The film depicts the FLN terrorism---especially the infamous
>milk bar bombing---as horrific, and it depicts the French paras who
>win the battle as quite sympathetic. Of course, they use systematic
>torture to uncover the FLN terrorist cells, something they learned
>about from captivity under the Viet Nimh---and torture works all the
>way to removing the FLN and their stashes of bombs and their
>bomb-factories from the Casbah.
Interesting that you see the torturers as sympathetic. The last time I
saw it it was introduced by Ahmed Ben Bella who answered some
questions on `terrorism'.
>Which is where the film ends, in French victory. What it does not
>depict, though it certainly foreshadows, is how the French victory in
>the battle led to French strategic defeat---that is, how the methods
>of torture employed by the paras led to a shift in public opinion in
>the French democracy against the military and against the war effort,
>and this in turn led to mutiny by the military and an eventual
>"washing of his hands" of Algeria by De Gaulle. And thus how the FLN,
>without ever winning a single engagement at arms, murdered its way
>(most of the murders were of Algerian Arabs likely to form any sort
>of centrist or compromise leadership in any post-war Algeria) into
>absolute power over the newly independent Algeria. It's a film about
>how terrorism (as distinct from guerrilla warfare) works.
Naturally: terrorism is never the same as `warfare'.
>MJ Carley:
> >there are truths you can't mention about the famine, or 1690, or the
> >Civil War or the First World War in Ireland.
>I of course defer to you as to what truths "you can't mention" about
>Ireland. But I'll also express doubt that, whatever they are, they
>haven't already been mentioned.
They're mentioned, but not in polite company.
>MJ Carley: But there is no good reason to believe that the US is
>self-critical.
>On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the US is hugely
>self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is almost nothing but
>self-critical.
So it's US high culture which is self-critical, not the country
itself? I still don't believe and I still haven't seen any evidence
that the US is `hugely self-critical' at any level. From what I can
see, it is remarkably naive in that such criticism as there is in the
mainstream is framed as a departure from America's uniquely high
standards.
Richard Harter
wrote:
>So it's US high culture which is self-critical, not the country
>itself? I still don't believe and I still haven't seen any evidence
>that the US is `hugely self-critical' at any level.
Indeed, that appears to be true - you "haven't seen any evidence" and
it seems likely enough that you never shall - "see", that is.
frisbie...@yahoo.com
M J Carley wrote:
>
> I'm not demanding anything. The question is whether or not criticism
> (of the Chomskyan type) is typical of US culture. It isn't.
> --
It's not unusual. It will never get on TV though.
M J Carley
>wrote:
>>So it's US high culture which is self-critical, not the country
>>itself? I still don't believe and I still haven't seen any evidence
>>that the US is `hugely self-critical' at any level.
>Indeed, that appears to be true - you "haven't seen any evidence" and
>it seems likely enough that you never shall - "see", that is.
The `evidence' so far is three films about what a horrible time the US
had in Vietnam and the existence of Noam Chomsky. Hardly a clinched
case and certainly not proof that the US is a uniquely self-critical
country.
John W. Kennedy
> Besides being
> fascinating insofar as they demonstrate the invention of
> so much of filmic technique, they are also fascinating in how
> they deny the "racist bugbear" interpretation of Griffith
> if "Birth of a Nation" were all one knew about.
It is certainly true that Griffith's blindness in "Birth of a Nation" is
queerly opposed to his general attitude as expressed in his other films.
--
John W. Kennedy
"But now is a new thing which is very old--
that the rich make themselves richer and not poorer,
which is the true Gospel, for the poor's sake."
-- Charles Williams. "Judgement at Chelmsford"
Bruce Scott TOK
>Another book I like is an old high-school (maybe college by now)
>history book called The American Pageant. Highly educational, many
>things I never knew. That the US might have invaded Cuba or Canada
>before the Civil War, but the South didn't want more free states and
>the North didn't want more slave states. That the idea the South went
>to war over the tariff is nonsense because the amount of money involved
>was tiny. Being a well-researched work it names names, dates, and
>figures.
Thanks for that tip. I've vaguely heard of this one.
>I have no use for works of "history" that ignore major events that
>contradict the thesis of the author.
Indeed.
Richard Harter
wrote:
>In the referenced article, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>>On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:56:13 GMT, ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley)
>>wrote:
>
>>>So it's US high culture which is self-critical, not the country
>>>itself? I still don't believe and I still haven't seen any evidence
>>>that the US is `hugely self-critical' at any level.
>
>>Indeed, that appears to be true - you "haven't seen any evidence" and
>>it seems likely enough that you never shall - "see", that is.
>
>The `evidence' so far is three films about what a horrible time the US
>had in Vietnam and the existence of Noam Chomsky. Hardly a clinched
>case and certainly not proof that the US is a uniquely self-critical
>country.
You're a very funny man - not, perhaps, intentionally, but
none-the-less amusing.
M J Carley
>On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:37:00 GMT, ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley)
>wrote:
>>The `evidence' so far is three films about what a horrible time the
>>US had in Vietnam and the existence of Noam Chomsky. Hardly a
>>clinched case and certainly not proof that the US is a uniquely
>>self-critical country.
>You're a very funny man - not, perhaps, intentionally, but
>none-the-less amusing.
So what's your proof that the US is a uniquely self-critical country?
smw
Michael S. Morris wrote:
Oh, yeah,
> and besides stories told from (Griffith's imagined) Indian
> point of view about whites raping and killing Indians, there's
> the story about the jobless man with the sick wife denied
> work finally resorting to crime and getting caught taking
> cash from the rich man's desk drawer, which cash turns out
> to be a bribe the rich man is taking in exchange for voting
> a certain way on some civic board. And there's the one about
> the greedy capitalist who corners corn ("and that ain't hay"),
> and uses his monopoly to raise prices, causing a poor mother
> and starving children to beg for bread, and, in his glee over
> the wealth and power so obtained, dances around and falls
> into a grain elevator and drowns in it. Like that. You know---
> critical.
Sorry, Mike, that's not being "critical of the US," that's standard
anti-modern as anti-capitalist fare, imported wholesale. Nothing in your
description makes this specific to the US.
...
> MJ Carley:
> But there is no
> good reason to believe that the US is self-critical.
>
> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
> almost nothing but self-critical.
High culture is almost by definition critical of its society; again,
this tells us exactly nothing about the US.
Arindam Banerjee
> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
> almost nothing but self-critical.
>
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@netdirect.net)
What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
Arindam Banerjee
smw wrote:
> Michael wrote:
> > Bruce wrote:
> >
> > In European countries these things are taught within the mainstream.
> > In
> > Germany full length attention is given to the many peasant uprisings
> > and
> > their causes and their fate (i.e., not just the stuff in the 20th
> > Century).
> >
> > **************
> > I'm doubtful, Bruce. I've heard from a half-dozen travelers (one a
> > German descendant) that the German activities in World War II
> > are verboten in Germany.
>
> That's utterly absurd. Teaching about them starts in elementary school
> and continues uninterrupted in any class where it makes remotely sense
> throughout highschool.
What is taught to them? Children are taught differently about the same
thing at different times. Like under British rule they were taught how
the British rule was good for Indians. When India got independence the
kids were taught how the British rule was bad for Indians.
My great-uncle said that he had participated in a school debate where
the motion was "British rule is the best thing for India". He spoke
for the motion, and it won. In my time, such a topic would be
considered unthinkable.
Mens sana
"Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:1137676959....@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
>> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
>> almost nothing but self-critical.
>>
>> Mike Morris
>> (msmo...@netdirect.net)
>
> What is US high culture
>
An oxymoron.
MS.
Michael S. Morris
Thursday, the 18th of January, 2006
I said:
On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
almost nothing but self-critical.
Arindam:
What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
Low culture is television and bestsellers and pop music.
High culture is pretty much everything else.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
M J Carley wrote:
I'm not demanding anything. The question is whether or not criticism
(of the Chomskyan type) is typical of US culture. It isn't.
But criticism of the Chomskyan type simply is a tiny part of
a hugely self-critical cultural output of the US. (Right, the
*problem* with the US cultural output is less its insufficient
self-criticality and more its excessive self-absorption. Because
it is an imperial center, it ignores the existence of the
provinces.) Besides, Chomsky is a poor example of a critic---
he almost is more denunciatory than *critical*. (I'm thinking
of when I became quite disillusioned with him the time I heard
him holding forth on the radio on Sullivan's raids on the
Mohawk homelands during the Revolutionary War as some sort
of "genocide". The reality is it was a perfectly justified
mission in time of war that mostly fizzled to little or no
effect. Chomsky is almost doctrinaire in his anti-US-ishness.
Like he's incapable of *thinking* about history at all and
only warps everything he encounters into his extreme agenda.)
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Richard Harter
wrote:
>In the referenced article, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) writes:
>>On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:37:00 GMT, ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley)
>>wrote:
>
>>>The `evidence' so far is three films about what a horrible time the
>>>US had in Vietnam and the existence of Noam Chomsky. Hardly a
>>>clinched case and certainly not proof that the US is a uniquely
>>>self-critical country.
>
>>You're a very funny man - not, perhaps, intentionally, but
>>none-the-less amusing.
>
>So what's your proof that the US is a uniquely self-critical country?
You're kidding, right?
Bruce McGuffin
> In the referenced article, "Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> writes:
>
> >M J Carley wrote:
> > Chomsky is hardly a well-known commentator who regularly reaches
> > millions of Americans with his critical views.
>
> >You just got through telling me that you *didn't* mean lockstep
> >universal brainwashing agreement with criticism of the US. And now
> >you are demanding that millions "be reached" by Chomsky for him to be
> >well-known. The reality is the man is very well known---by millions
> >of Americans---, as are his views, and the reality also is that
> >Chomsky is an American critic of the US. One of many on the left. Not
> >to mention all the many on the right.
>
> I'm not demanding anything. The question is whether or not criticism
> (of the Chomskyan type) is typical of US culture. It isn't.
If I want to see criticism of the US, all I have to do is open my
local daily newspaper to the editorial page. But it's not "of the Chomsky
type", most of it is pretty well thought out.
Bruce
Bruce McGuffin
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Oh, yeah,
> > and besides stories told from (Griffith's imagined) Indian
> > point of view about whites raping and killing Indians, there's
> > the story about the jobless man with the sick wife denied
> > work finally resorting to crime and getting caught taking
> > cash from the rich man's desk drawer, which cash turns out
> > to be a bribe the rich man is taking in exchange for voting
> > a certain way on some civic board. And there's the one about
> > the greedy capitalist who corners corn ("and that ain't hay"),
> > and uses his monopoly to raise prices, causing a poor mother
> > and starving children to beg for bread, and, in his glee over
> > the wealth and power so obtained, dances around and falls
> > into a grain elevator and drowns in it. Like that. You know---
> > critical.
>
> Sorry, Mike, that's not being "critical of the US," that's standard
> anti-modern as anti-capitalist fare, imported wholesale. Nothing in
> your description makes this specific to the US.
So criticising the past treatment of American Indians is "standard
anti-modern as anti-capitalist fare", but criticising the Nazi past
treatment of Jews and others is a uniquely German willingness to face
their past. Have I got that right?
Bruce
M J Carley
>On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:14:05 GMT, ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley)
>wrote:
>>So what's your proof that the US is a uniquely self-critical country?
>You're kidding, right?
No. Somebody said:
I cannot think of another country that is more self-consciously
self-critical.
He has since backtracked by saying he was talking about `high
culture', but even so: what evidence is there for this claim?
M J Carley
Give us an example from an editorial in your local paper published
this week. If it's not online, give us a different example.
Michael Zeleny
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
>> MJ Carley:
>>> But there is no good reason to believe that the US is self-critical.
>> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
>> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
>> almost nothing but self-critical.
> High culture is almost by definition critical of its society; again,
> this tells us exactly nothing about the US.
It tells you that the U.S. is not an Augustan empire.
tum meae, si quid loquar audiendum,
vocis accedet bona pars et 'o sol
pulcher, o laudande!' canam recepto
Caesare felix.
teque, dum procedis, 'Io Triumphe'
non semel dicemus, 'Io Triumphe'
civitas omnis dabimusque divis
tura benignis.
--Q. Horatius Flaccus, Carmina 4.2.45-52
Michael Zel...@post.harvard.edu
http://larvatus.livejournal.com/
Michael S. Morris
Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
M J Carley wrote:
No. Somebody said:
I cannot think of another country that is more self-consciously
self-critical.
He has since backtracked by saying he was talking about `high
culture', but even so: what evidence is there for this claim?
Excuse me, but I see no such thing as backtracking in
what you say. High culture in any country is a product
of that country. Period. It's just the thoughtful component
of culture---the stuff that isn't TV or pop music.
The fact that you can find that which is not self-critical in
the U.S. does not erase the fact that practically all the
art, serious books, serious films, middlebrow books and films,
academic publications, etc., are negatively critical of the US,
whenever the subject comes up (i.e. whenever they aren't publications
in physics or chemistry). Nor does it erase the fact that it
is *US culture* and *US society* and *the money of US taxpayers
and and US patrons of art and US consumers of high culture* that
foster all of this criticism. That the US is uniquely self-critical
is because the US is so very large in population and wealth and in
diversity. Consequently, there is a loud, loud debate constantly
going on here about any and all things, and there are very large
numbers of books published here, most of them critical of
the US---albeit from widely disagreeing perspectives. US
universities are equally funded by the US society, and they
certainly concentrate critics of the US and draw them as immigrants
to the US from all over the world and consequently turn their
US criticism into self-criticism of the US by the US.
Your notions about this so far have seemed positively
clueless about the subject. Especially taking Chomsky as "typical"
of criticism, or even as a critic. Why pick somebody
who is so very doctrinaire Marxist as even representative
of criticism? Why not consider criticism from political
conservatives? Why not Rush Limbaugh, who does reach millions daily
in his radio broadcasts? Why doesn't he count as a constant
and loud and omnipresent US *critic* of the US, and
invariably negative?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>
>M J Carley wrote:
> No. Somebody said:
>
> I cannot think of another country that is more self-consciously
> self-critical.
>
> He has since backtracked by saying he was talking about `high
> culture', but even so: what evidence is there for this claim?
>Excuse me, but I see no such thing as backtracking in what you
>say. High culture in any country is a product of that
>country. Period. It's just the thoughtful component of culture---the
>stuff that isn't TV or pop music.
But high art is not characteristic of a country as a whole. If you
want to say that the educated classes of America are self-consciously
critical of their country (and I don't agree), say so. That is not the
same thing as saying that the country is self-conciously
self-critical.
>The fact that you can find that which is not self-critical in the
>U.S. does not erase the fact that practically all the art, serious
>books, serious films, middlebrow books and films, academic
>publications, etc., are negatively critical of the US, whenever the
>subject comes up (i.e. whenever they aren't publications in physics
>or chemistry).
I don't agree and I have yet to see evidence to convince me
otherwise. The films you mentioned, for example, are not critical of
the US's action in Vietnam: they are classic examples of superpower
self-pity.
>Nor does it erase the fact that it
>is *US culture* and *US society* and *the money of US taxpayers
>and and US patrons of art and US consumers of high culture* that
>foster all of this criticism. That the US is uniquely self-critical
>is because the US is so very large in population and wealth and in
>diversity. Consequently, there is a loud, loud debate constantly
>going on here about any and all things, and there are very large
>numbers of books published here, most of them critical of
>the US---albeit from widely disagreeing perspectives.
*Most* books published in the US (where the question arises) are
critical of the US? I don't believe you.
>US universities are equally funded by the US society, and they
>certainly concentrate critics of the US and draw them as immigrants
>to the US from all over the world and consequently turn their US
>criticism into self-criticism of the US by the US.
>Your notions about this so far have seemed positively clueless about
>the subject. Especially taking Chomsky as "typical" of criticism, or
>even as a critic.
I didn't raise Chomsky, somebody else did.
>Why pick somebody who is so very doctrinaire Marxist as even
>representative of criticism?
He's not a Marxist.
>Why not consider criticism from political conservatives? Why not Rush
>Limbaugh, who does reach millions daily in his radio broadcasts? Why
>doesn't he count as a constant and loud and omnipresent US *critic*
>of the US, and invariably negative?
Because he isn't a critic of the US: his `criticism' is framed in
terms of a fall from grace, of a defence of an America which is under
attack from liberals/political correctness/whatever.
Bruce McGuffin
> In the referenced article, Bruce McGuffin <mcgu...@edinburgh.ll.mit.edu> writes:
> >ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley) writes:
>
> >> I'm not demanding anything. The question is whether or not
> >> criticism (of the Chomskyan type) is typical of US culture. It
> >> isn't.
>
> >If I want to see criticism of the US, all I have to do is open my
> >local daily newspaper to the editorial page. But it's not "of the
> >Chomsky type", most of it is pretty well thought out.
>
> Give us an example from an editorial in your local paper published
> this week. If it's not online, give us a different example.
Lets see ... the most critical item today is probably a claim
that requiring students to pass a test before high school graduation
is part of a long US tradition of racism:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2006/01/19/the_new_jim_crow/
or if you prefer a history of innapropriate government spying:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/19/us_spying_isnt_new/
It that's not enough for you, I may be forced to look earlier in the
week, but I think you may have to pay for older items.
You can probably find more-critical stuff in the NY Times.
Bruce
smw
Bruce McGuffin wrote:
The fact that I snipped the stuff about Indians should have been a clue,
but since it apparently wasn't, and since "this" apparently didn't do it
either -- no, you got that wrong.
Arindam Banerjee
Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Thursday, the 18th of January, 2006
>
> I said:
> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
> almost nothing but self-critical.
> Arindam:
> What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
>
> Low culture is television and bestsellers and pop music.
I thought that was the US high culture.
> High culture is pretty much everything else.
Huh?
>
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
I said:
On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
almost nothing but self-critical.
Arindam:
What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
I said:
Low culture is television and bestsellers and pop music.
Arindam:
I thought that was the US high culture.
Do you think of yourself as even *trying* to be funny at present?
I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
probably at the summit of world political philosophy, plus
a huge scholarship and commentary thereon. It has produced
world poets in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, T.S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson,
Marianne Moore. Novelists like Herman Melville and Mark Twain
and Stephen Crane. Or Cormac McCarthy and
Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and
Saul Bellow. Thayer's _Beethoven_. Samuel Eliot Morison's
histories and William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman.
Music from Robert Johnson and Hoagy Carmichael and Muddy
Waters and Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet and Cole
Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein
and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Louis
Armstrong and Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra and
Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald
and bluegrass and the Carter Family and John Coltrane and
Chuck Berry and Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Grisman
and Ry Cooder and Aerosmith and the Allmann Brothers.
Not to mention John Phillip Sousa and Stephen Foster
and George M. Cohan and the southern hymn tradition and
George Gershwin and Roger Sessions and Phillip Glass
and Virgil Thompson and John Adams and Morten Lauridsen.
The plays of Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller. And Edward
Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe and the Hudson River school
and Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack. The Kronos Quarter
and Chanticleer Robert Shaw and New York and LA Phils,
plus the long tradition of orchestras and choruses in
San Francisco, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Boston. The
architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright
and Frank Gehry, the films of John Ford and Cecil B. De
Mille and Stan Brakhage and Buster Keaton and Errol
Morris and Quentin Tarantino. The Apollo landings and
Robert Goddard and half of all world scientific advances since
about 1930. What about the Old World art forms that are
honoured here and kept going? Like art preserved in
first-rank museums or the Metropolitan Opera or the
Metropolitan Ballet? In ballroom dancing, the US has
contributed swing to the dozen or so recognized dances.
The idea that US culture is all sitcoms and John Grisham
and Kelly Clarkson is just willful ignorance.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
M J Carley
>Do you think of yourself as even *trying* to be funny at present?
>I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
>Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
>probably at the summit of world political philosophy, plus
>a huge scholarship and commentary thereon.
`The summit of world political philosophy'? Higher than Tom Paine,
Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, ...?
>It has produced world poets in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman,
>T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Marianne
>Moore.
So, with the exception of Eliot, nobody to touch Yeats, Dante,
Shakespeare, MacNeice (allow me my tastes), ...
>Novelists like Herman Melville and Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. Or
>Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth
>and Saul Bellow.
So nobody to touch Joyce, Beckett, Cervantes, Calvino, ...
>Thayer's _Beethoven_. Samuel Eliot Morison's
>histories and William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman.
>Music from Robert Johnson and Hoagy Carmichael and Muddy
>Waters and Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet and Cole
>Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein
>and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Louis
>Armstrong and Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra and
>Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald
>and bluegrass and the Carter Family and John Coltrane and
>Chuck Berry and Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Grisman
>and Ry Cooder and Aerosmith and the Allmann Brothers.
>Not to mention John Phillip Sousa and Stephen Foster
>and George M. Cohan and the southern hymn tradition and
>George Gershwin and Roger Sessions and Phillip Glass
>and Virgil Thompson and John Adams and Morten Lauridsen.
Funny that the music is the long list and that many of the composers
were despised ny American high culture. But you are right: some of those
people invented their field.
>The plays of Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller.
They can touch O'Casey and Shakespeare and Pirandello and Shaw.
>And Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe and the Hudson River school and
>Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack.
So nobody to touch Picasso and Miro and Caravaggio and ...
>The Kronos Quarter and Chanticleer Robert Shaw and New York and LA
>Phils, plus the long tradition of orchestras and choruses in San
>Francisco, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Boston. The architecture of
>Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, the films
>of John Ford and Cecil B. De Mille and Stan Brakhage and Buster
>Keaton and Errol Morris and Quentin Tarantino.
If you hadn't mentioned QT, you'ld have been doing well. But the
Hollywood movie is one of the great pleasures of the refined spirit.
>The Apollo landings and Robert Goddard and half of all world
>scientific advances since about 1930.
Apollo landings: superannuated Nazi. Robert Goddard: one of many.
>What about the Old World art forms that are honoured here and kept
>going?
Honoured and kept going? These things would die without America?
michael
>>>If I want to see criticism of the US, all I have to do is open my
>>>local daily newspaper to the editorial page. But it's not "of the
>>>Chomsky type", most of it is pretty well thought out.
>>
>>Give us an example from an editorial in your local paper published
>>this week. If it's not online, give us a different example.
>
>
> Lets see ... the most critical item today is probably a claim
> that requiring students to pass a test before high school graduation
> is part of a long US tradition of racism:
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2006/01/19/the_new_jim_crow/
>
> or if you prefer a history of innapropriate government spying:
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/19/us_spying_isnt_new/
>
> It that's not enough for you, I may be forced to look earlier in the
> week, but I think you may have to pay for older items.
>
> You can probably find more-critical stuff in the NY Times.
we are definitely entering Monty Python territory with this fellow...
think the sketch in _The Life of Bryan_: "All right, but apart from the
sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation,
roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans
ever done for us?"
it is and will ever be thus with semi-literate europeans, particularly
those of a certain ideological bent... just compare German
"self-criticism", all after the fact and in hindsight (which even then
is rarely 20/20), with what went on in the US during the Vietnam war...
did 1- or 500,000 Germans ever try to levitate OKW headquarters or bust
into Buchenwald *during* the war?
gimme a break...
michael
smw
michael wrote:
...>
> it is and will ever be thus with semi-literate europeans, particularly
> those of a certain ideological bent... just compare German
> "self-criticism", all after the fact and in hindsight (which even then
> is rarely 20/20), with what went on in the US during the Vietnam war...
> did 1- or 500,000 Germans ever try to levitate OKW headquarters or bust
> into Buchenwald *during* the war?
Quite right, they didn't, and continue to bear the shame. But they
haven't started a war ever since.
Arindam Banerjee
Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
>
>
> I said:
> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
> almost nothing but self-critical.
> Arindam:
> What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
> I said:
> Low culture is television and bestsellers and pop music.
> Arindam:
> I thought that was the US high culture.
>
> Do you think of yourself as even *trying* to be funny at present?
When do I ever try to be funny, Morris?
> I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
> Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
> probably at the summit of world political philosophy,
Written by a bunch of descendants of convicts who wanted to break the
treaties the British had with the natives of US, so that they and their
descendants could rob their lands and murder them comprehensively. As
done.
heh-heh. To quote myself:
"Turn, Morris, turn the Hubble, the Hubble deep space telescope
Upon the flag - not fluttering - upon the USAn lunarscope."
Show us the landing sites, Morris. All the debris that they left.
Send a probe to take pictures for the world to see, if you cannot turn
the Hubble, or if it won't work that way.
> and
> Robert Goddard and half of all world scientific advances since
> about 1930. What about the Old World art forms that are
> honoured here and kept going? Like art preserved in
> first-rank museums or the Metropolitan Opera or the
> Metropolitan Ballet? In ballroom dancing, the US has
> contributed swing to the dozen or so recognized dances.
And you did not even mention Walt Disney anywhere. Nor MAD magazine,
and all the wonderful, wonderful USAn comics. Nor stuff like
Star-Trek, Asimov, Tesla, creators of computers and software (my
living, that is) and the Golden Gate Bridge. Nor Hollywood with Mr
Clint Eastwood Sir.
> The idea that US culture is all sitcoms and John Grisham
> and Kelly Clarkson is just willful ignorance.
I am ignorant about all that. To me USA's highest culture at this time
is "Desperate Housewives". Your Bushling watches that show, and why
not.
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
I said:
I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
probably at the summit of world political philosophy, plus
a huge scholarship and commentary thereon.
MJ Carley:
`The summit of world political philosophy'? Higher than Tom Paine,
Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, ...?
Tom Paine probably doesn't belong in this company, but, yes,
what is known as the American Political Testament---the Declaration,
the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers certainly stands alongside
Aristotle, Macchiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, Plutarch, Plato,
Hobbes, and John Locke.
I said:
It has produced world poets in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman,
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Marianne
Moore.
MJ Carley:
So, with the exception of Eliot, nobody to touch Yeats, Dante,
Shakespeare, MacNeice (allow me my tastes), ...
No one else belongs with Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. But after
that cut, Pound and Eliot and Zukofsky and Olson and Whitman
certainly stand beside Yeats and Byron and Keats and Browning.
I said:
Novelists like Herman Melville and Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. Or
Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth
and Saul Bellow.
MJ Carley:
So nobody to touch Joyce, Beckett, Cervantes, Calvino, ...
Melville and Twain stand right alongside Joyce and Cervantes. Beckett
and Calvino might be a slightly lesser level, but Pynchon and Cormac
McCarthy are alongside them.
I said:
Thayer's _Beethoven_. Samuel Eliot Morison's
histories and William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman.
Music from Robert Johnson and Hoagy Carmichael and Muddy
Waters and Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet and Cole
Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein
and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Louis
Armstrong and Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra and
Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald
and bluegrass and the Carter Family and John Coltrane and
Chuck Berry and Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Grisman
and Ry Cooder and Aerosmith and the Allmann Brothers.
Not to mention John Phillip Sousa and Stephen Foster
and George M. Cohan and the southern hymn tradition and
George Gershwin and Roger Sessions and Phillip Glass
and Virgil Thompson and John Adams and Morten Lauridsen.
MJ Carley:
Funny that the music is the long list
I happened to be thinking about music.
MJ Carley:
and that many of the composers
were despised ny American high culture.
Since you seem to be utterly clueless about American
culture, and since {pick wellnigh any great artist}
and he was probably despised by {pick any country's
"high culture" at the time}, I fail to see the
relevance of such a quip.
As I said American culture is vast, and contains
critics "upon their backs to bite 'em, and so
ad infinitum."
MJ Carley:
But you are right: some of those
people invented their field.
Invention of a field simply isn't
all their is to art. (Lest you assume I
would agree with any such nonsense.)
I said:
The plays of Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller.
MJ Carley:
They can touch O'Casey and Shakespeare and Pirandello and Shaw.
Shakespeare? No other playwright touches him. In the second rank
would be Racine and Schiller and Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
and Aristophanes. But, yeah, O'Neill and Miller certainly stand beside
O'Casey and Ionesco and Pirandello and Shaw and Beckett.
I said:
And Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe and the Hudson River school and
Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack.
MJ Carley:
So nobody to touch Picasso and Miro and Caravaggio and ...
Picasso, no. But most of these certainly touch Caravaggio and Miro.
I said:
The Kronos Quarter and Chanticleer Robert Shaw and New York and LA
Phils, plus the long tradition of orchestras and choruses in San
Francisco, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Boston. The architecture of
Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, the films
of John Ford and Cecil B. De Mille and Stan Brakhage and Buster
Keaton and Errol Morris and Quentin Tarantino.
MJ Carley:
If you hadn't mentioned QT, you'ld have been doing well. But the
Hollywood movie is one of the great pleasures of the refined spirit.
Yeah, but we are talking stuff that transcends "the Hollywood
movie", at least the standard instantiation thereof.
I said:
The Apollo landings and Robert Goddard and half of all world
scientific advances since about 1930.
MJ Carley:
Apollo landings: superannuated Nazi. Robert Goddard: one of many.
I don't think you understand my point: German science, definitely,
but the United States is an immigrant nation by its very design.
I said:
What about the Old World art forms that are honoured here and kept
going?
MJ Carley:
Honoured and kept going? These things would die without America?
I sing in the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. I am performing the
Robert Levin completion of the Mozart Requiem next Friday and Saturday
nights with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. *I think there is
an art of choral performance* and, yes, if no one is around to
perform these works, then they die. So classical choral performance
happens to be one art form that is *living* right here and now
in a medium-sized city in the US.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
michael
true... but given the historical circumstances, it's hard to know
whether or not that has anything at all to do with "shame" or a
heightened sense of "self-criticism"... after all, neither the French
nor the British have colonized anyone recently either... a quick glance
at the Suez thingie back in the 50's would suggest that the US just may
have had a hand in that non-occurence as well...
michael
smw
michael wrote:
The Brits co-started Iraq and started Falklands which may well be modern
history's most pointless war. The French did atrocious things in Algeria
way past WW II. And, yes, it's the heritage of shame (and the political
rhetoric that comes out of it and which does, of of course, serve
multiple political goals) that is responsible for the impossibility of
German-started wars. Look, you're on record knowing shit-all about
German political discourse, and why would you, but let's not get into
this any further, okay?
The point about every-day critical discourse in US media is this: all
that criticism is almost exclusively wrapped up in US-worship -- take
Paul Krugman, the big bugbear of the conservatives -- column after
column, he'll tell you taht this is "a great country" which is doing
something particular that is wrong -- i.e. wrongness is always defined
against a standard of fundamental or essential US rightness. The US
isn't "a great country" --- like all countries, it's at best mediocre,
and many of its institutions suck very badly (as do all state
institutions everywhere). What passes as "critique" here is always
articulated against the backdrop of an imaginary US that _would_ be a
great country and doesn't exist. I.e., critique is always, in the last
analysis, affirmative. Which makes the critical culture itself affirmative.
michael
> The Brits co-started Iraq and started Falklands which may well be modern
> history's most pointless war. The French did atrocious things in Algeria
> way past WW II.
too true... but, as i said, neither has colonized anyone recently...
>And, yes, it's the heritage of shame (and the political
> rhetoric that comes out of it and which does, of of course, serve
> multiple political goals) that is responsible for the impossibility of
> German-started wars.
uh-huh... the devastation, division, and occupation of the physical
plant of the country by foreign armies could hardly have had any impact
to compare with that of "discourse"... there is, after all, nothing
outside the text, pace all those who died in dresden etc...
> Look, you're on record knowing shit-all about
> German political discourse, and why would you, but let's not get into
> this any further, okay?
oh, yeah... as to my little quip about Schmitt and the blonde, blue-eyed
"requirement" for democracy (i'm quite aware that he would not admit of
the possibility of liberal-democracy, sharpie that he was and all):
"Political democracy thus cannot rest on the sameness of all human
beings, but on belonging to a distinct people. Belonging to a
particular people can be determined by very different factors
(conceptions of shared race, faith, shared fate, and tradition).
given his tendency to valorize the 'real' or existential over
theoretical considerations, one would have to be a fool not to realize
that, as a soon-to-be Nazi, Schmitt was talking racial homogeneity
here... furthermore:
"... since the nineteenth century, belonging consists above all in
belonging to a certain nation, in national homogeneity."
since these were written in the '20s, one would have to assume that poor
ol' Carl had yet to hear of either the US or Canada, two of the oldest
functioning democracies (liberal variety) in the world...
"In its literal sense and in its historical appearance the state is a
specific entity of a people."
my shit-all assumption here is that "people" is a translation of "volk",
as in volkswagen, herr hitler's gift to bobos in paradise everywhere...
now you can dance as many angels around as many pins as you like, but
the man is talking racial homogeneity here...
bottom line is, europeans don't 'get' north american liberal democracy--
never have... and talking with "german" Turks and "french" algerians
makes me doubt they ever will... and by "get" i mean be able to match
our performance in operating political systems *not* built on some
mythical volk or transcendent "culture", rather than writing insightful
commentaries a la de Tocqueville...
> The point about every-day critical discourse in US media is this:
> all that criticism is almost exclusively wrapped up in US-worship --
> take Paul Krugman, the big bugbear of the conservatives -- column after
> column, he'll tell you taht this is "a great country" which is doing
> something particular that is wrong -- i.e. wrongness is always defined
> against a standard of fundamental or essential US rightness. The US
> isn't "a great country" --- like all countries, it's at best mediocre,
> and many of its institutions suck very badly (as do all state
> institutions everywhere). What passes as "critique" here is always
> articulated against the backdrop of an imaginary US that _would_ be a
> great country and doesn't exist. I.e., critique is always, in the last
> analysis, affirmative. Which makes the critical culture itself affirmative.
recognizing the genuine accomplishments and inherent potentialities of
US liberal-democracy hardly constitutes "worship", a favourite phrase of
yours when confronted with someone with a fundamental respect for their
"mongrel" nation-state...
what "critique" of real-world conditions *isn't* articulated against an
imaginary backdrop? maybe they should employ the 3rd reich or modern
france as a "backdrop"? the roman empire? the british? my guess is the
states would still come up smelling like a (potential) rose...
"unable to imagine a better world
take flowers in your fist..."
that (probable mis)quote of a poem by sharon thesen won't mean much to
you, given that you're on record as having shit-all capacity to read
'literary' texts, but... well, i like it...
michael
M J Carley
>MJ Carley:
> `The summit of world political philosophy'? Higher than Tom Paine,
> Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, ...?
>
>Tom Paine probably doesn't belong in this company, but, yes,
>what is known as the American Political Testament---the Declaration,
>the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers certainly stands alongside
>Aristotle, Macchiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, Plutarch, Plato,
>Hobbes, and John Locke.
The summit is getting pretty crowded.
>I said:
> It has produced world poets in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman,
> T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Marianne
> Moore.
>MJ Carley:
> So, with the exception of Eliot, nobody to touch Yeats, Dante,
> Shakespeare, MacNeice (allow me my tastes), ...
>
>No one else belongs with Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. But after
>that cut, Pound and Eliot and Zukofsky and Olson and Whitman
>certainly stand beside Yeats and Byron and Keats and Browning.
So American culture is no more exceptional than anywhere else and
pound for pound ranks lower than, to pick a random example, Ireland.
>I said:
> Novelists like Herman Melville and Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. Or
> Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth
> and Saul Bellow.
>MJ Carley:
> So nobody to touch Joyce, Beckett, Cervantes, Calvino, ...
>
>Melville and Twain stand right alongside Joyce and Cervantes. Beckett
>and Calvino might be a slightly lesser level, but Pynchon and Cormac
>McCarthy are alongside them.
Naaah.
I was thinking of the jazz players, in particular. Mozart was accepted
by the elite of his day: Louis Armstrong wasn't until he was quite old
and Robert Johnson never was.
>MJ Carley:
> But you are right: some of those
> people invented their field.
>Invention of a field simply isn't all their is to art. (Lest you
>assume I would agree with any such nonsense.)
I didn't say it was. My point is that the artistic contribution of
those people (say Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Johnny
Cash, as some representative examples) is so enormous that they
created what came after them (most modern popular music in this case).
>I said:
> The plays of Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller.
>MJ Carley:
> They can touch O'Casey and Shakespeare and Pirandello and Shaw.
>Shakespeare? No other playwright touches him. In the second rank
>would be Racine and Schiller and Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and
>Aristophanes. But, yeah, O'Neill and Miller certainly stand beside
>O'Casey and Ionesco and Pirandello and Shaw and Beckett.
So again, America is not that exceptional.
>MJ Carley:
> If you hadn't mentioned QT, you'ld have been doing well. But the
> Hollywood movie is one of the great pleasures of the refined spirit.
>Yeah, but we are talking stuff that transcends "the Hollywood movie",
>at least the standard instantiation thereof.
Actually, I think Hollywood movies don't need to be transcended: one
of the areas of American film making that can stand comparison with
the rest of the world's cinema is the high quality Hollywood movie. I
think American films can be at their worst when they are trying to be
`artistic'.
>I said:
> The Apollo landings and Robert Goddard and half of all world
> scientific advances since about 1930.
>MJ Carley:
> Apollo landings: superannuated Nazi. Robert Goddard: one of many.
>
>I don't think you understand my point: German science, definitely,
>but the United States is an immigrant nation by its very design.
Design?
>I said:
> What about the Old World art forms that are honoured here and kept
> going?
>MJ Carley:
> Honoured and kept going? These things would die without America?
>
>I sing in the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. I am performing the
>Robert Levin completion of the Mozart Requiem next Friday and Saturday
>nights with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. *I think there is
>an art of choral performance* and, yes, if no one is around to
>perform these works, then they die.
You've missed the point.
>So classical choral performance happens to be one art form that is
>*living* right here and now in a medium-sized city in the US.
Wales has a strong tradition of choral singing. You could just as well
argue that Bach would die out without Welsh miners.
M J Carley
>ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley) writes:
>> Give us an example from an editorial in your local paper published
>> this week. If it's not online, give us a different example.
>Lets see ... the most critical item today is probably a claim
>that requiring students to pass a test before high school graduation
>is part of a long US tradition of racism:
>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2006/01/19/the_new_jim_crow/
That's a letter to the editor.
>or if you prefer a history of innapropriate government spying:
>
>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/19/us_spying_isnt_new/
Pretty mild stuff really. It is certainly not exceptionally
self-critical.
>It that's not enough for you, I may be forced to look earlier in the
>week, but I think you may have to pay for older items.
>
>You can probably find more-critical stuff in the NY Times.
Not from what I've seen of it.
M J Carley
>true... but given the historical circumstances, it's hard to know
>whether or not that has anything at all to do with "shame" or a
>heightened sense of "self-criticism"... after all, neither the French
>nor the British have colonized anyone recently either... a quick
>glance at the Suez thingie back in the 50's would suggest that the US
>just may have had a hand in that non-occurence as well...
Quite true (and one of the reasons I prefer Eisenhower to Kennedy as a
president). The point is that someone claimed that America was
exceptionally self-critical. It isn't and the most evidence anyone has
produced is a newspaper article saying that the US government has
spied on people in the past. I can read similar articles about other
countries in the press of those countries.
M J Carley
> The point about every-day critical discourse in US media is
>this: all that criticism is almost exclusively wrapped up in
>US-worship -- take Paul Krugman, the big bugbear of the conservatives
>-- column after column, he'll tell you taht this is "a great country"
>which is doing something particular that is wrong -- i.e. wrongness
>is always defined against a standard of fundamental or essential US
>rightness. The US isn't "a great country" --- like all countries,
>it's at best mediocre, and many of its institutions suck very badly
>(as do all state institutions everywhere). What passes as "critique"
>here is always articulated against the backdrop of an imaginary US
>that _would_ be a great country and doesn't exist. I.e., critique is
>always, in the last analysis, affirmative. Which makes the critical
>culture itself affirmative.
I suspect you're wasting your time with such a subtle argument.
Sayan Bhattacharyya
michael <vafu...@urcon.com> wrote:
>smw wrote:
>
>
>> The Brits co-started Iraq and started Falklands which may well be modern
>> history's most pointless war. The French did atrocious things in Algeria
>> way past WW II.
>
>too true... but, as i said, neither has colonized anyone recently...
No, but they hang on to their colonies, don't they? The British hang
on to Gibraltar, for example, although Spain claims it and probably
ha a better claim on it.
(This is true of the USA as well, too -- to be fair. What, pray,
is the USA doing in Guantanamo Bay ???? That place rightfully
belongs to Cuba.)
smw
michael wrote:
> smw wrote:
>
>
>> The Brits co-started Iraq and started Falklands which may well be
>> modern history's most pointless war. The French did atrocious things
>> in Algeria way past WW II.
>
>
> too true... but, as i said, neither has colonized anyone recently...
>
>> And, yes, it's the heritage of shame (and the political rhetoric that
>> comes out of it and which does, of of course, serve multiple political
>> goals) that is responsible for the impossibility of German-started wars.
>
>
> uh-huh... the devastation, division, and occupation of the physical
> plant of the country by foreign armies could hardly have had any impact
> to compare with that of "discourse"... there is, after all, nothing
> outside the text, pace all those who died in dresden etc...
This is rapidly entering bullshit territory -- be good.
Arindam Banerjee
prosperity no doubt but is it worth it?
Let us see. As usual, Mike Morris leads the charge in rab on this.
"Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:1137721113.2...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> Michael S. Morris wrote:
>> Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
>>
>>
>> I said:
>> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
>> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
>> almost nothing but self-critical.
>> Arindam:
>> What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
>> I said:
>> Low culture is television and bestsellers and pop music.
Mike Morris is a snob. Common people love TV and bestsellers and pop music,
in addition to MacD superserves.
>> Arindam:
>> I thought that was the US high culture.
>>
>> Do you think of yourself as even *trying* to be funny at present?
>
> When do I ever try to be funny, Morris?
If Mike Morris thinks I am funny when actually I am being deadly serious,
then how funny would I be when I wanted to be funny?
As a matter of fact, I did try to be funny once, when I wrote a prose poem
(in my head) titled "Always Drink Soup".
But my conscience did not permit me to put it into words, as people in
delicate medical conditions could die after reading it.
>> I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
>> Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
>> probably at the summit of world political philosophy,
>
> Written by a bunch of descendants of convicts who wanted to break the
> treaties the British had with the natives of US, so that they and their
> descendants could rob their lands and murder them comprehensively. As
> done.
Oh dear. There I did it. I will be outcasted by every patriotic USAn from
now on. Still, what difference would that make?
Gandhi had some use for Thoreau, though.
> plus
>> a huge scholarship and commentary thereon. It has produced
>> world poets in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, T.S.
>> Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson,
>> Marianne Moore.
Low second to third raters, all of them there that I know of. Frost the
medium second-rater is not mentioned by Morris.
>>Novelists like Herman Melville
Now he's of some use. The title of one of his books can be extended to form
a neat abusive expression.
and Mark Twain
>> and Stephen Crane. Or Cormac McCarthy and
>> Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and
>> Saul Bellow. Thayer's _Beethoven_. Samuel Eliot Morison's
>> histories and William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman.
I once brought a book by Faulker from the library. We all laughed at his
ridiculous and pretentious style. Americans cannot write, not serious stuff
anyway, and the interesting question is, why are they such miserable
failures at anything seriously or properly literary. I have my ideas, but I
won't express them for I know I am so unpopular already with them.
>> Music from Robert Johnson and Hoagy Carmichael and Muddy
>> Waters and Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet and Cole
>> Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein
>> and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Louis
>> Armstrong and Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra and
>> Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald
>> and bluegrass and the Carter Family and John Coltrane and
>> Chuck Berry and Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Grisman
>> and Ry Cooder and Aerosmith and the Allmann Brothers.
>> Not to mention John Phillip Sousa and Stephen Foster
>> and George M. Cohan and the southern hymn tradition and
>> George Gershwin and Roger Sessions and Phillip Glass
>> and Virgil Thompson and John Adams and Morten Lauridsen.
All of them should be abhorrent to me, I am afraid. I faced a deep personal
crisis when I was confronted with Western music, after emigrating to
Australia. I saved myself by creating my own lyrics in English, with
Indian tunes and lines. Playing them in my head, I retained by sanity.
>> The plays of Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller. And Edward
>> Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe and the Hudson River school
>> and Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack. The Kronos Quarter
>> and Chanticleer Robert Shaw and New York and LA Phils,
>> plus the long tradition of orchestras and choruses in
>> San Francisco, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Boston.
Maybe the best you have got is Tennesse Williams. I have seen only two in
India: "A streetcar named Desire" and "Annie get your gun". They were
really good, worth remembering, but not quite first rate. Some shows and
musicals are reasonably good, but never thought-provoking. The quality of
morality and candour and insight with the glimpse of the ideal, all that
being necessary for qualifying as first rate, is invariably absent in the
USAn consciousness - save in the character of "Dirty Harry".
The
>> architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright
>> and Frank Gehry,
Clumsy expensive stuff, I'll bet.
the films of John Ford and Cecil B. De
>> Mille and Stan Brakhage and Buster Keaton and Errol
>> Morris and Quentin Tarantino.
Did any of them do "Roman Holiday"?
The Apollo landings
>
> heh-heh. To quote myself:
>
> "Turn, Morris, turn the Hubble, the Hubble deep space telescope
> Upon the flag - not fluttering - upon the USAn lunarscope."
>
> Show us the landing sites, Morris. All the debris that they left.
> Send a probe to take pictures for the world to see, if you cannot turn
> the Hubble, or if it won't work that way.
>
>> and
>> Robert Goddard and half of all world scientific advances since
>> about 1930.
Technical advances, more likely. And why not, they get the best brains from
all over the world, by paying top money.
The US did not invent penicillin, the most useful invention of the 20th
century. For that, Australia is responsible. The world owes a huge lot to
Australia, a fine healthy country.
The US had certainly made advances into the arts of killing and torturing,
with inventions of the atomic bomb, biological warfare, etc.
What with all the money they got, they could have done a lot better in
science. They *still* believe in the ridiculous theories of relativity!
Continuing belief in wrong theories, after they have been systematically
debunked, shows a lack of proper scientific approach. When you have lots of
money, you can make stuff by sheer prototyping, and that is what they have
done. Made advancements merely on heuristics with mathematical dressing,
not proper theory.
>>What about the Old World art forms that are
>> honoured here and kept going? Like art preserved in
>> first-rank museums or the Metropolitan Opera or the
>> Metropolitan Ballet? In ballroom dancing, the US has
>> contributed swing to the dozen or so recognized dances.
I am sure they will win outright in all the three-hundred-pounder
categories.
> And you did not even mention Walt Disney anywhere. Nor MAD magazine,
> and all the wonderful, wonderful USAn comics. Nor stuff like
> Star-Trek, Asimov, Tesla, creators of computers and software (my
> living, that is) and the Golden Gate Bridge. Nor Hollywood with Mr
> Clint Eastwood Sir.
>
>> The idea that US culture is all sitcoms and John Grisham
>> and Kelly Clarkson is just willful ignorance.
The best of US culture lies in its youth and zest. I do not mean the modern
films about silly young people, but in that quality of youth the elderly
should have. To think new things, go new places. Twain showed it. Bugsy
(greatest of all USAns) showed it even better.
frisbie...@yahoo.com
M J Carley wrote:
> In the referenced article, smw <sm...@ameritech.net> writes:
>
> > The point about every-day critical discourse in US media is
> >this: all that criticism is almost exclusively wrapped up in
> >US-worship -- take Paul Krugman, the big bugbear of the conservatives
> >-- column after column, he'll tell you taht this is "a great country"
> >which is doing something particular that is wrong -- i.e. wrongness
> >is always defined against a standard of fundamental or essential US
> >rightness. The US isn't "a great country" --- like all countries,
> >it's at best mediocre, and many of its institutions suck very badly
> >(as do all state institutions everywhere). What passes as "critique"
> >here is always articulated against the backdrop of an imaginary US
> >that _would_ be a great country and doesn't exist. I.e., critique is
> >always, in the last analysis, affirmative. Which makes the critical
> >culture itself affirmative.
>
> I suspect you're wasting your time with such a subtle argument.
> --
Yes.
It's one of Noam's favorites.
G*rd*n
> >true... but given the historical circumstances, it's hard to know
> >whether or not that has anything at all to do with "shame" or a
> >heightened sense of "self-criticism"... after all, neither the French
> >nor the British have colonized anyone recently either... a quick
> >glance at the Suez thingie back in the 50's would suggest that the US
> >just may have had a hand in that non-occurence as well...
ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley):
> Quite true (and one of the reasons I prefer Eisenhower to Kennedy as a
> president). The point is that someone claimed that America was
> exceptionally self-critical. It isn't and the most evidence anyone has
> produced is a newspaper article saying that the US government has
> spied on people in the past. I can read similar articles about other
> countries in the press of those countries.
It seems to me the U.S. was fairly self-critical some time
ago and isn't at present. Part of the reason racial issues
in the U.S. were worked out in the Civil Rights movement and
a good deal of legal reform instead of degenerating into civil
war along the lines of dozens of other places with similar
problems was because a large part of the population was able
to concede that something was seriously wrong with the way
things were and at least tolerate, if not actually work towards
a different arrangement.
The period of the Civil Rights movement was a period of
leftish self-criticism; there have also been periods of
right-wing self-criticism, for example (as I recall) in the
1950s there was much carrying-on about how Americans weren't
nationalistic (i.e. imperialistic) enough. The President
found it necessary to promote some kind of conference of
very important people to define the National Purpose.
Besides the difference in criticism across time, there is also
a difference across class. Up until fairly recently, only a
few people had access to media as speakers -- the bourgeoisie,
those who were chartered to write opinion for newspapers,
cause their heads to talk on television, speak in university
classrooms, government administrators and elected officials.
Indeed, we are still focusing on such as Krugman and Kennedy
and Eisenhower, not Usenet posters (many of whom are bitterly
critical of the U.S.) or the deli countermen of Akron. Fashions
for national self-criticism among the bourgeoisie, and among
the folk as a whole, may go in and out of style at different
times.
michael
is that the "discursive" name for reality when it's inconvenient?
OBQuote: "Is it raining outside, Mom?"
"Let me check the Farmer's Almanac."
"Why not the newspaper?"
"Not theoretische enough."
"So why not look outside?"
"Ach. That's just bullshit."
michael
> I suspect you're wasting your time with such a subtle argument.
nah... silke wastes no time on subtlety... she just snips the more
subtle responses to her vacant sophisms...must be nice for you, though,
finding such obvious horseshit subtle...you must love Michael Moore...
michael
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 20th of January, 2006
MJ Carley:
`The summit of world political philosophy'? Higher than Tom Paine,
Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, ...?
I said:
Tom Paine probably doesn't belong in this company, but, yes,
what is known as the American Political Testament---the Declaration,
the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers certainly stands alongside
Aristotle, Macchiavelli, Marx, Adam Smith, Plutarch, Plato,
Hobbes, and John Locke.
MJ Carley:
The summit is getting pretty crowded.
You seem to have lost complete sight of the argument here. I made my list
to counter the claim that there was no such thing as a US "high culture".
I did not write in order to claim anything about the productions of US
high culture being better or higher or pound for pound higher
than those of any other culture. Pound for pound, ancient Greek culture
beats anything that's been seen on the planet before or since.
My point is simply that strip malls and TV sitcoms ain't "American culture"
anymore than are performances of the Mozart Requiem in the US.
American culture is made up of both, and a whole lot more. It's huge,
in fact, and contains so many aspects, almost any list one were to
try to make would leave huge swathes out. And the high culture---all
those aspects that are thoughtful, which are many---is built on
self-criticism of the US. What your claim amounts to is just what I
accused you of at the start: You want widespread *agreement* with Noam
Chomsky among the American public in order to count Chomsky. You are
*measuring* this self-criticism thing by how effective it is as propaganda.
Well, sorry, but since criticism in the US is so very diverse and
pluralistic,
no one critical view will ever epitomize the whole---there simply isn't a
whole here to epitomize.
I said:
It has produced world poets in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman,
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Marianne
Moore.
MJ Carley:
So, with the exception of Eliot, nobody to touch Yeats, Dante,
Shakespeare, MacNeice (allow me my tastes), ...
I said:
No one else belongs with Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. But after
that cut, Pound and Eliot and Zukofsky and Olson and Whitman
certainly stand beside Yeats and Byron and Keats and Browning.
MJ Carley
So American culture is no more exceptional than anywhere else and
pound for pound ranks lower than, to pick a random example, Ireland.
Irish high culture *is* pound for pound exceptional. It ain't,
therefore, a random example. However, your point is utterly
pointless, as I said, since I wasn't trying to vaunt anything at all.
What I'm telling you is there's a whole lot here besides strip
malls and if you, for instance, read what is books in it, you'll find
that it is pretty consistently based on criticism of the US.
Silke gets it right by way of going on to get it wrong. There is an ideal
US in Americans' heads, in a way that there simply isn't an ideal
Germany or Ireland or Norway. It's because the US is an immigrant
nation built in a wilderness. Hence, the "city on a hill" motif
in American thought. Because of the shared ideal---the ideal America
of "liberty and justice for all"---this leads to a constant
negative criticism of the real America, up against the ideal
place we still hope to create. So, what you find is a huge cultural
output (I think it qualified as huge by about the 1930's) which
is predominantly critical of the US. Yes, Silke is correct, that
this negative criticism begins in affirmation of the American ideal.
Still, it remains negative criticism of the US, and it begins very
early on in our literature.
I said:
Novelists like Herman Melville and Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. Or
Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth
and Saul Bellow.
MJ Carley:
So nobody to touch Joyce, Beckett, Cervantes, Calvino, ...
I said:
Melville and Twain stand right alongside Joyce and Cervantes. Beckett
and Calvino might be a slightly lesser level, but Pynchon and Cormac
McCarthy are alongside them.
MJ Carley
Naaah.
Yeah.
And I've read them all.
I said:
Thayer's _Beethoven_. Samuel Eliot Morison's
histories and William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman.
Music from Robert Johnson and Hoagy Carmichael and Muddy
Waters and Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet and Cole
Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein
and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Louis
Armstrong and Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra and
Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald
and bluegrass and the Carter Family and John Coltrane and
Chuck Berry and Stevie Ray Vaughan and David Grisman
and Ry Cooder and Aerosmith and the Allmann Brothers.
Not to mention John Phillip Sousa and Stephen Foster
and George M. Cohan and the southern hymn tradition and
George Gershwin and Roger Sessions and Phillip Glass
and Virgil Thompson and John Adams and Morten Lauridsen.
MJ Carley:
Funny that the music is the long list
I said:
I happened to be thinking about music.
MJ Carley:
and that many of the composers
were despised ny American high culture.
I said:
Since you seem to be utterly clueless about American culture, and
since {pick wellnigh any great artist} and he was probably despised
by {pick any country's "high culture" at the time}, I fail to see the
relevance of such a quip.
MJ Carley:
I was thinking of the jazz players, in particular. Mozart was accepted
by the elite of his day: Louis Armstrong wasn't until he was quite old
and Robert Johnson never was.
Of course you were trying to make some little political dig, which was,
yet again, outside and irrelevant to the argument we were having. And of
course
you essentially get it wrong and in a way completely consistent with
euroleft
prejudices. Mozart died penniless, for starters, and Louis Armstrong was
recognized as a genius in his long and successful lifetime. You can read him
extolled as
a creative genius of the very first magnitude already in serious
literature---in
Henry Miller's _Colossus of Maroussi_, for instance---which I'm thinking
probably
dates to the 1940's.
MJ Carley:
But you are right: some of those
people invented their field.
I said:
Invention of a field simply isn't all their is to art. (Lest you
assume I would agree with any such nonsense.)
MJ Carley
I didn't say it was. My point is that the artistic contribution of
those people (say Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Johnny
Cash, as some representative examples) is so enormous that they
created what came after them (most modern popular music in this case).
But this point was never in dispute. But, I would not ever buy into
denigrating a contemporary musician by comparison, which
seems to be what you are doing by focusing on creators of genres. Buddy Guy
and Stevie Ray Vaughan both came after Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters
and both played within the genre of music that Johnson and Muddy
Waters created. They're still creative artists of the very highest order.
I said:
The plays of Eugene O'Neil and Arthur Miller.
MJ Carley:
They can touch O'Casey and Shakespeare and Pirandello and Shaw.
I said:
Shakespeare? No other playwright touches him. In the second rank
would be Racine and Schiller and Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aristophanes. But, yeah, O'Neill and Miller certainly stand beside
O'Casey and Ionesco and Pirandello and Shaw and Beckett.
MJ Carley:
So again, America is not that exceptional.
I'm still puzzled as to how you figure *anyone* has
here claimed the US is *exceptional* as to the highness of its
artistic productions. No one said that. I certainly never did
and never would. America is a latecomer to the feast table of Western
high culture. Still, it has invented some few new art forms
and carries on the tradition of many more. That's all I said.
But, now,---and here's the point---insofar as American art is
concerned with anything, this art is critical of the US. In a
way that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are not critical of Russia.
Now do you get it?
MJ Carley:
If you hadn't mentioned QT, you'ld have been doing well. But the
Hollywood movie is one of the great pleasures of the refined spirit.
I said:
Yeah, but we are talking stuff that transcends "the Hollywood movie",
at least the standard instantiation thereof.
MJ Carley:
Actually, I think Hollywood movies don't need to be transcended: one
of the areas of American film making that can stand comparison with
the rest of the world's cinema is the high quality Hollywood movie. I
think American films can be at their worst when they are trying to be
`artistic'.
I agree with you only insofar as I personally like and enjoy non-"artistic"
Hollywood films. It is ridiculous, however, to dismiss the very
fine art films that are also made here. And, moreover, those art
films tend to be "critical of the US".
I said:
The Apollo landings and Robert Goddard and half of all world
scientific advances since about 1930.
MJ Carley:
Apollo landings: superannuated Nazi. Robert Goddard: one of many.
I said:
I don't think you understand my point: German science, definitely,
but the United States is an immigrant nation by its very design.
MJ Carley:
Design?
Congressional power to grant citizenship was written into the
Constitution from the get-go, the people who wrote it being
immigrants or the sons thereof.
I said:
What about the Old World art forms that are honoured here and kept
going?
MJ Carley:
Honoured and kept going? These things would die without America?
I said:
I sing in the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. I am performing the
Robert Levin completion of the Mozart Requiem next Friday and Saturday
nights with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. *I think there is
an art of choral performance* and, yes, if no one is around to
perform these works, then they die.
MJ Carley:
You've missed the point.
No, I definitely have not. But you have.
I said:
So classical choral performance happens to be one art form that is
*living* right here and now in a medium-sized city in the US.
MJ Carley:
Wales has a strong tradition of choral singing. You could just as well
argue that Bach would die out without Welsh miners.
I am well aware of the strong Welsh tradition of choral singing. But,
then again, whether the arts were alive and well in Wales was never called
into question.
Mike Morris
Mens sana
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote in message
news:11t05dc...@corp.supernews.com...
>
>
> Thursday, the 19th of January, 2006
>
>
> I said:
> On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that the
> US is hugely self-critical; in fact, that US high culture is
> almost nothing but self-critical.
> Arindam:
> What is US high culture, Morris? And what is US low culture?
> I said:
> Low culture is television and bestsellers and pop music.
> Arindam:
> I thought that was the US high culture.
>
> Do you think of yourself as even *trying* to be funny at present?
> I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
> Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
> probably at the summit of world political philosophy, plus
> a huge scholarship and commentary thereon.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's look at your claims a little closer. Your Declaration of Independence,
the rhetoric of liberty and equality from the mouths of slave owners, is
rightly seen as hypocrisy.
America may have offered its constitution to the world but the world said no
thanks. No free people have ever copied the American constitution.
The Federalist Papers are is essence political marketing pamphlets notable
only for their role in persuading people to enslave themselves to a flawed
constitution.
Far from being the pinnacle of world political philosophy, the US
constitution and ancillary documents constitute a dead end. Fossils who's
only value is as a cautionary example to show what can happen if a people
lack vigilance.
Mens sana.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Surely you jest. Being very generous, a little of the work of Twain,
Melville, Elliot and maybe Whitman could be squeezed onto the end of a list
of second rank cultural achievments.
The rest may enjoy a modicum of ephemeral notoriety but they are no more
than the flotsam of mercenary populism. The entire output of the lot of them
worth less than a page of Wilde or Swift.
Mens sana.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Apollo landings and
> Robert Goddard and half of all world scientific advances since
> about 1930.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Any objective study of the Apollo landings will show that they represent the
greatest achievement of Nazi science. Without Werner von Braun and his gang
there would have been no Apollo programme but they built their experience on
the bodies of the unfortunate victims of concentration camp Dora.
Even with the Nazi input, America still lagged behind the USSR who were the
real space pioneers. The Soviets had the first satellite, the first man in
space, the first woman in space and the stunning success of MIR the first
manned space station. After the break-up of the Soviet Union NASA discovered
that Russian rocket engine technology was years ahead of their own. So much
so that they bought more than 100 Russian rocket engines.
Perhaps you could list the, 'half of all world scientific advances since
about 1930', that you're claiming for America because I confess to being
unable to see them.
Mens sana.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
smw
michael wrote:
> smw wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> michael wrote:
>>
>>> smw wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> The Brits co-started Iraq and started Falklands which may well be
>>>> modern history's most pointless war. The French did atrocious things
>>>> in Algeria way past WW II.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> too true... but, as i said, neither has colonized anyone recently...
>>>
>>>> And, yes, it's the heritage of shame (and the political rhetoric
>>>> that comes out of it and which does, of of course, serve multiple
>>>> political goals) that is responsible for the impossibility of
>>>> German-started wars.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> uh-huh... the devastation, division, and occupation of the physical
>>> plant of the country by foreign armies could hardly have had any
>>> impact to compare with that of "discourse"... there is, after all,
>>> nothing outside the text, pace all those who died in dresden etc...
>>
>>
>>
>> This is rapidly entering bullshit territory -- be good.
>
>
> is that the "discursive" name for reality when it's inconvenient?
Sure, Germany was economically destroyed after the war and never
recovered. Hell, most German consider hot running water a miracle, and
if it weren't for Finnish care packages, the kids would have nothing to
eat.
smw
michael wrote:
that from the man who heard somewhere that the Holocaust was taboo in
Germany.
So, your type of response -- helpless ignorant rage in response to the
assertion that US culture is no more self-critical than most other
developed countries and somewhat less self-critical than some -- whose
side does it bolster, you think? if you think?
M J Carley
>You seem to have lost complete sight of the argument here. I made my
>list to counter the claim that there was no such thing as a US "high
>culture". I did not write in order to claim anything about the
>productions of US high culture being better or higher or pound for
>pound higher than those of any other culture. Pound for pound,
>ancient Greek culture beats anything that's been seen on the planet
>before or since. My point is simply that strip malls and TV sitcoms
>ain't "American culture" anymore than are performances of the Mozart
>Requiem in the US. American culture is made up of both, and a whole
>lot more. It's huge, in fact, and contains so many aspects, almost
>any list one were to try to make would leave huge swathes out. And
>the high culture---all those aspects that are thoughtful, which are
>many---is built on self-criticism of the US.
So now you are limiting your original claim to American high culture,
not the whole country.
>What your claim amounts to is just what I accused you of at the
>start: You want widespread *agreement* with Noam Chomsky among the
>American public in order to count Chomsky. You are *measuring* this
>self-criticism thing by how effective it is as propaganda. Well,
>sorry, but since criticism in the US is so very diverse and
>pluralistic, no one critical view will ever epitomize the
>whole---there simply isn't a whole here to epitomize.
No. I am saying that what you are claiming is self-criticism is not
critical of America and is not exceptional.
>MJ Carley
> So American culture is no more exceptional than anywhere else and
> pound for pound ranks lower than, to pick a random example,
> Ireland.
>Irish high culture *is* pound for pound exceptional. It ain't,
>therefore, a random example.
(I'm Irish. This was a little joke.)
>However, your point is utterly pointless, as I said, since I wasn't
>trying to vaunt anything at all. What I'm telling you is there's a
>whole lot here besides strip malls and if you, for instance, read
>what is books in it, you'll find that it is pretty consistently based
>on criticism of the US. Silke gets it right by way of going on to
>get it wrong. There is an ideal US in Americans' heads, in a way that
>there simply isn't an ideal Germany or Ireland or Norway.
There is no ideal Ireland in people's heads? This is plain wrong.
>It's because the US is an immigrant nation built in a
>wilderness. Hence, the "city on a hill" motif in American
>thought. Because of the shared ideal---the ideal America of "liberty
>and justice for all"---this leads to a constant negative criticism of
>the real America, up against the ideal place we still hope to
>create.
This `criticism' tends to be framed in terms of a fall from
grace. Realistic criticism of the US would say that, for example, the
crimes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are not exceptional.
>I said:
> Melville and Twain stand right alongside Joyce and
> Cervantes. Beckett and Calvino might be a slightly lesser level,
> but Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy are alongside them.
>MJ Carley
> Naaah.
>Yeah.
>And I've read them all.
In the original?
>MJ Carley:
> I was thinking of the jazz players, in particular. Mozart was
> accepted by the elite of his day: Louis Armstrong wasn't until he
> was quite old and Robert Johnson never was.
>Of course you were trying to make some little political dig, which
>was, yet again, outside and irrelevant to the argument we were
>having. And of course you essentially get it wrong and in a way
>completely consistent with euroleft prejudices. Mozart died
>penniless, for starters, and Louis Armstrong was recognized as a
>genius in his long and successful lifetime. You can read him extolled
>as a creative genius of the very first magnitude already in serious
>literature---in Henry Miller's _Colossus of Maroussi_, for
>instance---which I'm thinking probably dates to the 1940's.
No political dig at all and dying penniless isn't the point.
>MJ Carley
> I didn't say it was. My point is that the artistic contribution
> of those people (say Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson,
> Johnny Cash, as some representative examples) is so enormous that
> they created what came after them (most modern popular music in
> this case).
>But this point was never in dispute. But, I would not ever buy into
>denigrating a contemporary musician by comparison, which seems to be
>what you are doing by focusing on creators of genres. Buddy Guy and
>Stevie Ray Vaughan both came after Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters
>and both played within the genre of music that Johnson and Muddy
>Waters created. They're still creative artists of the very highest
>order.
I wasn't trying to denigrate anyone. I was saying just how great I
think some of these people were.
>MJ Carley:
>
> So again, America is not that exceptional.
>I'm still puzzled as to how you figure *anyone* has here claimed the
>US is *exceptional* as to the highness of its artistic
>productions. No one said that. I certainly never did and never
>would. America is a latecomer to the feast table of Western high
>culture. Still, it has invented some few new art forms and carries on
>the tradition of many more. That's all I said. But, now,---and
>here's the point---insofar as American art is concerned with
>anything, this art is critical of the US. In a way that Tolstoy and
>Dostoevsky are not critical of Russia. Now do you get it?
First, you claimed that America (the country) was exceptionally
self-critical. Then you said that American high culture was
exceptionally self-critical (a weaker claim). If you are sticking to
that claim (and in the case of the movies you cited, you're wrong), I
can't agree because I don't see it. If I want, I can find criticism of
other countries in the art of those countries (John McGahern and
Leonardo Sciascia to pick a couple of examples I'm familiar with) so
what exactly is exceptional about such self-criticism as there is in
American art?
>I agree with you only insofar as I personally like and enjoy
>non-"artistic" Hollywood films. It is ridiculous, however, to dismiss
>the very fine art films that are also made here. And, moreover, those
>art films tend to be "critical of the US".
But they are not characteristic of the country.
>MJ Carley:
> Wales has a strong tradition of choral singing. You could just as well
> argue that Bach would die out without Welsh miners.
>I am well aware of the strong Welsh tradition of choral singing. But,
>then again, whether the arts were alive and well in Wales was never
>called into question.
Nobody said the arts weren't alive and well in the US: the question
was whether or not they would die out without the US.
Michael S. Morris
Friday, the 20th of January, 2006
Arindam:
heh-heh. To quote myself:
"Turn, Morris, turn the Hubble, the Hubble deep space telescope
Upon the flag - not fluttering - upon the USAn lunarscope."
You funny man, you.
Arindam:
And you did not even mention Walt Disney anywhere. Nor MAD magazine,
and all the wonderful, wonderful USAn comics. Nor stuff like
Star-Trek, Asimov, Tesla, creators of computers and software (my
living, that is) and the Golden Gate Bridge. Nor Hollywood with Mr
Clint Eastwood Sir.
All very wonderful stuff. Some of which is high, some of which
is low. (Clue for you, Arindam: "High" and "low" refer to accessibility,
not quality. There is plenty of low art that is perfectly wonderful
and great. In fact, you should have objected specifically to
Chuck Berry, who is immediately accessible to almost everyone
in his culture. I.e., his art is "low" art, at the same time
as being great. Stuff like jazz and blues started out as folk,
or "low" art, and have now evolved to the point where they are
quite "high", meaning only that it takes knowledge and intellect to
be able to listen to their present-day practitioners
and to appreciate them.) In any event, the distinction is important
here for two reasons: (1) You scoffed at the idea that the
United States had any high culture at all. It does. And (2)
sort of, duh, obviously, if we are to ask ourselves
whether US culture is "self-critical", given that criticism
is an inherently intellectual activity---
we would expect to find such criticism only in the *high* art
and scholarship, and not in the low art sector of American
cultural production.
It is only by an exercise of prejudice on your part---
namely the prejudice that American culture is only
comprised of the low, and in particular the bad low---
you know, McDonald's and saccharine pop music and
strip malls and "Desperate Housewives"---that
anyone makes the claim in the first place that American
culture isn't self-critical. But, that prejudice
is just a stupid prejudice, and McDonald's simply
ain't all there is.
Oh, by the way, Arindam---have you yet calculated the
the stresses necessary, say, to support a 1-mile-radius
hollow sphere in the center of the earth? I mean, taking
into account what may be deduced from the orbit of
the moon and Newtonian gravity about how much mass the
earth is made up of?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
David Matthews
>> I mean, US culture has given the world The Declaration of
>> Independence, The US Constitution, and the Federalist Papers,
>> probably at the summit of world political philosophy,
>
> Written by a bunch of descendants of convicts who wanted to break the
> treaties the British had with the natives of US, so that they and their
> descendants could rob their lands and murder them comprehensively. As
> done.
>
What exactly was written by the descendents of convicts? Are you perhaps
confusing America with Australia?
David Matthews
> No, but they hang on to their colonies, don't they? The British hang
> on to Gibraltar, for example, although Spain claims it and probably
> ha a better claim on it.
>
The British are not hanging on to anything. They put it to the vote and the
Gibraltese (Gibraltians?) voted for the status qou.
Bruce McGuffin
> In the referenced article, Bruce McGuffin <mcgu...@edinburgh.ll.mit.edu> writes:
> >ens...@bath.ac.uk (M J Carley) writes:
>
> >> Give us an example from an editorial in your local paper published
> >> this week. If it's not online, give us a different example.
>
> >Lets see ... the most critical item today is probably a claim
> >that requiring students to pass a test before high school graduation
> >is part of a long US tradition of racism:
>
> >http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2006/01/19/the_new_jim_crow/
>
> That's a letter to the editor.
And? I said I'd find it on the editorial page, and I did. Since you
are now claiming in another sub-thread that criticism by the
intelligentsia doesn't count, an unsolicited letter should be worth
more than a formal editorial.
Or do you think the author is some kind of foreigner who snuck into
the country posing as a god-fearing, red-blooded-american in order to
plant unjustified crticism in the newspaper? I'd better notify the
NSA.
>
> >or if you prefer a history of innapropriate government spying:
> >
> >http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/19/us_spying_isnt_new/
>
> Pretty mild stuff really. It is certainly not exceptionally
> self-critical.
>
> >It that's not enough for you, I may be forced to look earlier in the
> >week, but I think you may have to pay for older items.
> >
> >You can probably find more-critical stuff in the NY Times.
>
> Not from what I've seen of it.
What I'm hearing is you only value criticism from your own particular
political point of view. The other stuff doesn't count.
Bruce