There were musicals both in movies and on Broadway that told tales of social significance before the song “Sing Me a Song of Social Significance” appeared in 1937 in the Broadway musical “Pins and Needles”. They go back, of course, to Kern and Hammerstein’s “Showboat” and even King Vidor’s silent movie, “Hallalujah!”, a film that takes the form of a musical of the sort that will be discussed here as much as it also embellished the form of the documentary. There are images of stooping field hands interspersed with images of rousing Church choirs that leave you asking which one of these is the true life of Negroes in the South. Forget about Gershwin’s “Of Thee I Sing” whose relation to politics is to the clichés told about politicians, and so is somewhat like Kaufman and Hart’s “Merton of the Movies”, which is a satire on the conventions of Hollywood as they are known from what were then the already well established conventionalized portrayals of Hollywood. First rate political satire such as is found in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or in “Primary Colors” does not readily yield itself to the musical form because its métier is the rapture caused by political rhetoric, which has rhythms all its own.
Read MoreTrue Lies
Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.
Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.
Read MorePop Art Jokes
Andy Warhol wasn’t the only artist of the mid Twentieth Century who broke out of the era of Abstract Expressionism, which had lasted, after all, for only about twenty years, by painting objects that were found all around us in the consumerist culture recognized by the thinkers of the time and in ways that led to ready duplication by all the technology of the mechanical revolution. It was just that Warhol was expert at merchandising himself, which was perfectly appropriate a way to unify production with the meaning of his product, though one can claim that all artists, back to those recorded in Vasari, were up to the same task of projecting their names and reputations and in competition with one another for fame and money. Here are three other pop artists worth notice and from whose works we can assess the purely artistic strengths and shortcomings of their movement.
Read MoreOld and New Protests
Rather than think of the current protests in isolation, compare them to the protest that went on during the Sixties. There was, then, much more damage to property, and a far greater impact on social structure. This time the protests are aimed at revising police policies so that they are less brutal without requiring any large scale change in the way society is ordered. Back in the Sixties, demonstrations that led to the burning down of large parts of downtowns, usually those inhabited by African Americans, and that required significant presence of the National Guard in a number of states for a number of weeks, was part of the movement to change American society as a whole so that its Black citizens would no longer be members of an inferior caste but understood as an ethnic group like any other ethnic group in American society. The stakes were bigger and the outcomes more significant. It is a shame that sixty years later, it is that same ethnic group that is at the forefront of national concern, portrayed by some as victims or heroes and by others as troublemakers. That we have not moved further on in black-white relations shows just how much slavery was our original sin. America has not yet found a way to put race behind it.
Read MoreThe Importance of Lady Windermere's Fan
What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.
Read MoreDefunding the Police
Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.
Read MoreOpinions on the Current Demonstrations
Opinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.
Read MoreThe Essential Forces
What is the fundamental process that governs social or physical existence? This is a very old sounding question in that the Greeks wondered which of the four elements predominated in the makeup of the world. Was it air, fire, earth or wind? And, later on in the ancient world, there was a search for the greatest good, the most perfect emotion. Was it stoicism or cynicism or pleasure? Far from being put away, this same question crops up in modern thought. When I was a graduate student, people discussed whether Hobbes had found out the true secret of social life, that the fundamental force was violence; that was what guaranteed social order and so economic forces and other social forces paled in comparison with the ability of violence to dominate the scene. Hobbes had discovered not invented a solution, never mind that Hobbes thought reason rather than violence governed human interaction or that violence is useful under certain conditions but that under other circumstances money and prestige are more important motivators. People die for their country for a reason and arms merchants are motivated by greed. Violence is useful only when there is anarchy in the air or when there is foreign invasion or there is a crime of passion.
Read MoreThe Current Riots
When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.
Read MoreHammett's Thugs
Dashell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were known to have kept their Stalinist sympathies long after such sentiments were no longer in fashion, which is close to what Hellman said in her defense during her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman’s Stalinism is clear in her writing. Her “Watch on the Rhine”, which gained fame for its prematurely anti-Fascist sympathies, to adapt another phrase that had weight in its time, should also be remembered for its major plot device: an ostensibly all American family becomes involved in a plot to murder a Nazi envoy, despite the fact that committing political murder is illegal in the United States, as well as a violation of the spirit of the national political culture, even if the play provides prudent motives for doing so. Hellman approves of thuggery as sometimes moral. It is a necessary means to a good end: participating on the right side of a world wide war that at the time happened to be undeclared. By that reasoning, anti-Communists would have been in their rights, some fifteen years later, to kill her. Politics may go in and out of fashion, but American political principles, I like to think, are for the long run. It is better for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace in Brooklyn than to carry over to here the conflicts that inflame some other region of the world.
Read MoreThe Talking Pineapple
Back in the old days, before the coronavirus, educational policy that is nowadays about how to open schools at all and what are the tradeoffs between distance learning and classroom learning, was about whether standardized testing was a good thing. Everybody, apparently, except those who make money off of them, was against standardized testing, though for different reasons. Most teachers and administrators criticized the tests for the burden they placed on teachers to raise the test performance of students ill equipped to take such tests, the teachers getting blamed if kids didn’t do better than students with the same demographic characteristics had done in the past. And that is not to speak of the unreliability of the tests. Reformers, on the other hand, criticized the tests for not allowing teachers to teach the students as they are or in creative ways, the tests measuring minor skills rather than the overall intellectual growth of a child, something that may not show up until years later.
Read MoreSilences
There was a newspaper report of an armed gunman who said, when told by his victim that it was a policeman that he was holding up, “You know, now I have to kill you.” That is the stuff of gangster melodrama, and may even be true. The exchange reminded me of “The Asphalt Jungle”, John Huston’s film noir movie of 1950, which was a remarkable movie because, among other things, it violated the movie convention whereby people who have others at gunpoint keep talking until the person with the gun pulled on him finds a way out of the situation. Rather, Louis Calhern just starts to sweat and lose his game face as he realizes that his erstwhile comrades in crime are going to kill him. However much they talk, the gangsters in “The Asphalt Jungle” don’t talk about what they are doing while they do it.
Why does the movie convention violated by “The Asphalt Jungle” make sense? Why do characters say what they are going to do rather than just do it? That is the same thing as asking why such dialogue occurs in real life, because the movie convention is simply exploiting and adopting a usage of everyday life, in that dramatic tension arises from whether an assailant will speak or not. So why did the gunman in the newspaper report act the way he did? (Here, I am engaged in applying Georg Simmel’s dictum, which is contrary to the accepted wisdom, that the sociologist can analyze fiction as well as real situations because both make use of the formal properties of social life.)
Read MoreTime Sets
A time set is the number of moments that are tied together because of a place or an occasion. We all deliberately refer to time sets when we celebrate birthdays and Thanksgiving. We for a moment remember when a child was born or what it was like at the first Thanksgiving, or at least the way we are taught about what had happened then. Every June Sixth, I remember D-Day and also recall the decreased attention it has garnered over the years. The contemplation of a time set does wonderful things for our imaginations.
Read MoreConsumerism and the Pandemic
According to the visuals and the commentary in the media, people want back their bars and beaches. They also want back auto racing and baseball even if there are no crowds in the stands. This goes contrary to what health specialists are saying, which is that opening up the economy will lead to an increase in the number and rate of deaths from coronavirus. It may be that people are willing to pay in lives lost for their pleasures, whether those are haircuts or tattoos or hanging out on crowded streets. The problem, however, is that this is more than an economic argument, in which case it would refer to the fact that all those people unemployed as a result of the shutdown need to be rehired so that they can put food on their tables. It goes deeper than that. I have heard people protesting in front of state legislatures that they are losing their liberties, that they are being imprisoned, which is a passionate and meaningful plea despite the fact that health emergencies have always been regarded as problems that can be subject to the intervention of state authorities who can order quarantine or keeping the bodies of plague victims in a house that included uncontaminated people until the time of the regularly scheduled pickups of corpses arrived, and also that I don’t know any provision in the Constitution that says that you have a right to infect other people with your diseases. Yes, coronavirus has deprived people of their liberty without due process of law, but this is a special kind of liberty, not the political kind which is what the Constitution refers to. Now what is this liberty that the protesters and I are speaking of?
Read MoreThe Triple Heresies and the Western World
There is an even broader claim that can be made about my thesis that social movements have three generic types, the Manichaen, the Donatist and the Arian, those terms adopted from three major Christian heresies. Christianity doesn’t just provide names for and historical examples of the three strands inherent in any social movement. It is that a social movement is not a formal idea, something inherent in the nature of social behavior. Rather, a social movement is an historical invention, and it was invented only once, by Christianity, because of some inherent feature of Christianity, which is that it can generate, out of its own religious and intellectual resources, these three kinds of heresies or specialized understandings of the overall doctrine and experience of the religion.
Read MoreRegional Museums
Cultures reside in formal institutions designed for their preservation. Whether those are newspapers or universities or secondary schools or church congregations or seminaries or legal systems, they are all self conscious about the need to protect the past by finding ways in which it relates to the present. The United States Supreme Court defends and protects the Constitution of the United States by giving it often quite controversial interpretations, just as English professors defend and protect the canon of great literature by finding new interpretations for old texts, by understanding how the texts fit into their own time and place, and by making room for new texts, so that American literature anthologies now include a number of African American writers.
Read MoreThe Age of Illustration
An illustrator is someone who provides pictures or graphics to help break up the text of a book or article and also provides a visual representation of something going on in a text. Illustration can therefore be thought of as a derivative form of art because the art does not rely on itself alone to convey its experience and message and that designation as derivative is also earned because illustrative art will have to be relatively simple and of conventional taste so that it will satisfy its magazine and best seller audiences. “Illustrator” can be thought of as a term of condescension by someone concerned with “high art”. Yet there was a great age of illustration that accompanied the popularity of wide circulation magazines, the technology available, from the 1880’s on, to give good quality reproductions of the artwork, and there was also a mass market for illustrated best selling novels, such as “Treasure Island”. Moreover, the age of illustration is not totally past. Consult the front page of the New York Times and congratulate the paper’s photo editor for having picked out what is usually a very artistically composed illustration for some top story. So let us consider the accomplishments and the point of view of some master illustrators from its Golden Age.
Read MoreThe Core Dilemma of Social Movements
Social movements are social structures and not just sets of ideas. The three strands of any social movement can be reduced to variations on a structural feature of social movements. That feature is the role of the elite. Marxists wondered whether the vanguard served as educators of a working class destined to wrest history from the grasp of their oppressors, or as leadership cadres for democratic parties, or as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The psychoanalytic movement provides a similar trinity of roles for its elite, each of these anchored in one of the three strands a social movement generates.
Read MorePolitics Before and After the Pandemic
What happened to the Squad of Four? You remember them, don’t you? They were the set of leftish congresswomen that came into office after the 2018 election: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, the firebrand from the Bronx, quickly in the spotlight because she was so young and had a mouth on her. Trump and his acolytes were quick to pounce on the Squad of Four and proclaim that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Socialists (and AOC was indeed a member of Social Democrats of America). That was what Trump was going to run against in 2020. Right wing rhetoric quickly turned racist, asking these women to go back to where they came from though that meant, in the case of AOC, going back to the Bronx, three of the four women born here though one was black and two were Muslim and AOC was Puerto Rican. It doesn’t take much to see the racism there. Nancy Pelosi had to pass a resolution rejecting racism however much she held these four at arms length, at one point remarking that they were only four of her members and so hardly spoke for her caucus. AOC disappointed people like me who had hoped she would bring new life and fresh ideas to the Democratic Party by opposing the deal whereby Amazon would bring 50,000 jobs to New York City, even though the plan, including tax favors that wouldn’t occur until the project was done, was supported by labor unions, the local Congresswoman, and political leaders throughout the city. Enough with this jejune radicalism.
Read MorePostmodern Portraitists
There was a new flowering of portraiture after the end of Abstract Expressionism. The painters involved were representational, and so not like De Kooning at all, in that they did not want their figures to disappear into the swaths or streaks of color. But neither were they realists, in that their object was not to accurately portray those they represented but to develop new ways of representing people so that each painter had his own signature style, that not just what happens because a painter paints in the way he knows how to paint, but because the creation of a distinctive style was the basis of his accomplishment: his models served his style rather than the other way round. The inspiration for this movement was Andy Warhol who did not enhance our understanding of the figures he portrayed, like Mao and Marilyn Monroe. It was, rather, that the figures were already popular icons and what he did was to industrially produce a large number of copies through a silkscreen process that allowed each of the standard images to be produced in different colors. Warhol’s imagination rested on standing aside from his images to note that they were images rather than on enhancing the images, and so what he produced seems to me very cold and devoid of the life of the people who lend him their images, but that may be what he was, after all, out to do, postmodern art, now included in what is called contemporary art, prizing coldness and irony rather than depth of feeling or character analysis as its primary virtue. Now those who entered this common project of making the art more important than its subject did not see Warhol as their inspiration and one, Alex Katz, thought that Warhol had stolen from him, but artists throughout the centuries view with their competitors for stature and are most upset with those who would claim to be their betters. Consult Vasari to see professional competition at play, or consult any biography of Picasso. Let us consider the different ways some contemporary artists did their number on the artistic presumption they shared that the model served the artist rather than the other way around.
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