North Coast Cafe, South

Christian Right & Suburban Despair

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

That sets the tone taken by a new book,   American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by  Chris Hedges,  a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and former Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times.  Hedges writes about his experiences researching his book in a not-to-be-missed article  found on Alternet 

I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

Andrew Sullivan

I read British, Catholic, Conservative, Homosexual witer, editor, blogger Andrew Sullivan every day. I don't agree with him very often, but he's one of the most intelligent, insightful, fair & honest scribblers on the Net.  The following, brazenly stolen from his blog is as good a reason why I put up with the stuff I find off-putting. This post is a gem.

"[The novel] is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative ... If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world," - Karen Armstrong, "A Short History of Myth."

Best Books?

Time magazine critics just published a list of 'best English-language novels 1923 - present.  Why 1923?  There were no good English language novels published in 1920?  Still, the list is amusing.

Far more amusing is Mathew Baldwin's "The Morning News" post titled Lone Star Statements a compilation of Amazon.com reader's reviews of many of the same books found on the Time list.

Well worth a smile, or two.

Capote

I'm eager to see the new film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, not so much because I'm interested in that puffy self-satisfied egoist Truman Capote who seemed to regularly embarrass himself on  TV talk shows in the drug-rattled later years of his life, (he died of an overdose in 1984, age 59), but because Hoffman is said to so exactly capture Capote's mannerisms, affectations and speech patterns that he is likely to be nominated and perhaps win Oscar this time out after having given so many bravera performances in previous films.

I'm likely to actually go to a movie theater to see this film rather than wait for the DVD which is my usual habit, because I've recently re-read In Cold Blood Capote's magnum opus said to have innovated the literary non-fiction genre. Capote was widely and rightfully celebrated for this ground-breaking book, but of the many literary non-fiction writers practicing today I'd place Capote low on the list, preferring instead, John McPhee, Tracy Kidder, Richard Rhodes, et al. whose work as literary journalists I believe is more distinguished in the George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London tradition. Still, In Cold Blood, masterly bit of writing, in a style that was cutting edge when it was published in 1965.  Like other literary non-fiction since, it first appeared in four installments in the New Yorker.

In her review of the movie in Slate Daphne Merkin acknowledges the movie's success in capturing the process of writing with which I am familiar, and interested.

Capote enables us to grasp, more than any movie on the subject I have seen, what it is exactly that a writer does when he or she writes, how observation leads to perception leads to the crafting of sentences. In so doing, it gets far closer to the complicated, elusive heart of this strange calling—the way it is both an explicitly private but implicitly public act, a means of rendezvousing with the self but also of showcasing the self—than any cinematic depiction until now.

So, there you have it. Three good reasons to get out and see this movie as soon as it is widely released and comes to a theater near-by.  But I know I'm going to be annoyed by all those commercials and previews.

 

 

The Authoritarian Personality

I remember reading The Authoritarian Personality back in the day --studying social psychology. It was a 'referential' work, often cited in argument and discussions among those of 'the movement'--the anti-war crowd eager for  political reform and social change evidenced in civil rights and the women's movement.

First published in 1950, its lead author Theodor Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School a Marxist-inspired collection of social science scholars dedicated to analysis of   cultural characteristics of capitalism. Another of the book's authors,  R. Nevitt Sanford of UC Berkeley, a distinguished psychologist, was fired for refusing to sign a McCarthy-era loyalty oath, just after the book came out.

The Authoritarian Personality addressed itself to the question of whether the United States might harbor significant numbers of people with a "potentially fascistic" disposition.

The Authoritarian Personality seemed to anticipate the fervent crusades against communism and the attacks on Chief Justice Earl Warren, the United Nations, and even fluoridation that would characterize postwar politics in the United States.

The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book's choice of subject matter all the more prescient.

Adorno and his associates devised the F scale, a method of analysing answers to key questions used to  identify nine key dimensions of a protofascist personality: conventionality, submissiveness, aggression, subjectivity, superstitiousness, toughness, cynicism, the tendency to project unconscious emotional responses onto the world, and heightened concerns about sex.

For example, subjects were asked how much they disagreed or agreed with such statements as:

"Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn." (Submissiveness.)

"Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished." (Aggression and sex.)

"No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished." (Toughness and aggression.)

"No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason." (Sex and cynicism.)

"When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit"? More

12 Books That Changed The World

A four-part series, 12 Books That Changed The World, will be broadcast next April on Britain's ITV.

"When people think of things that change the world, they tend to think of extraordinary events: the assassination of leaders, the invasion of countries, the havoc wreaked by natural disasters.

"There is something less attention-grabbing, but just as powerful, which changes the world - books. The series aims to show that the lives we lead have been formed as often as not by a single book."

                                     The Books

Darwin - The Origin of Species (1859)

The First Rule Book of the Football Association (1863)

William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)

Newton - Principia Mathematica (1687)

Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)

William Wilberforce - Speech to the House of Commons (May 12 1789)

The King James Bible (1611)

Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine (1769)

Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Michael Faraday - Experimental Research in Electricity (1855)

Marie Stopes - Married Love (1918)

Magna Carta (1215)

What Books Defined Your Generation?

An Ask MetaFilter member asked "What books have defined your generation?"

To which I replied:  Catcher In the Rye, Lord of the Flies, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Stranger in a Strange Land, On The Road, The Invisible Man, Notes of a Native Son, To Kill a Mockingbird, Portnoy's Complaint, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy of Sex, Catch 22, Silent Spring, Exodus...to name but a few.

Reading the other responses demonstrates how young people who hang out on the internet are, and how little they read.

Mudlarks, Costermongers & Chaunters

In the early 1850s English journalist Henry Mayhew began visiting London's East End  documenting the lives of the poor for Punch,  the humor magazine he founded in 1841.

He interviewed everyone—beggars, street-entertainers (such as Punch and Judy men), market traders, prostitutes, labourers, sweatshop workers, even down to the "mudlarks" who searched the stinking mud on the banks of the River Thames for wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships, and the "pure-finders" who gathered dog feces to sell to tanners.

He described their clothes, how and where they lived, their entertainments and customs, and made detailed estimates of the numbers and incomes of those practicing each trade. The books make fascinating reading, showing how marginal and precarious many peoples lives were, in what, at that time, must have been the richest city in the world.

Now, the University of Virginia has made Mayhew's profiles of these folks  available online. It's a fun read.  Link

Banned Books

Thanks to A Mindful Life I am reminded that the American Library Association's Banned Books week begins September 25th.

It's a bit shocking to learn that 42 of the books on the Radcliffe Publishing Course list of 100 Top Novels of the 20th Century were once the target by iindividuals or groups wishing to ban them, i.e. prohibit YOU or anyone else to read them.

The list shows targeted books in bold type.

1. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, James Joyce
7. Beloved, Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
9. 1984, George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
11. Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web, EB White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
15. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
23. Their Eyes were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp, John Irving
38. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View , EM Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
41. Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
45. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia, Willa Cather
52. Howard's End, EM Forster
53. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger
55. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz, Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
59. Passage to India, EM Forster
60. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities, Thomas Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace, John Knowles
68. Light in August, William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love, DH Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
81. The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
82. White Noise, Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
86. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians, Henry James
88. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
94. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread, EM Forster
99. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children , Salman Rushdie

The Dirt on the Bush Family

If you're at all like me you'd like to know what's in Kitty Kelly's book about the Bush family but don't want the trouble of reading the whole thing just to get the juicy bits. Thanks to Slate, the juciy bit alone can be found here.

Page 253:

At Andover, George W. Bush writes a morose essay about his sister's death. Searching for a synonym for "tears," he consults a thesaurus and writes, "And the lacerates ran down my cheeks." A teacher labels the paper "disgraceful."