In the latest Commentary, as always, Terry Teachout delivers his usual mix of faux-folksy self-aggrandization, tongue-clicking distaste for the genuinely 'popular', windy neocon kulturkampf rhetoric (even a positive mention of William Bennett!), Ed Sullivan-era nostalgia, and genuinely optimistic and sincere love of what he takes to be the American artistic soul - this time the occasion is blogs 'n' culture (hoo boy). I have my own suspicions about Teachout's real feelings about what it is to be 'American', but let's leave my worries aside for the moment, because here's our boy at his trademark mezzo-forte:
Well into the 1960's, it seemed that Zangwill and James had been right [about the centrality and superiority of the 'melting pot' vision of American culture]. Not only did American artists of all kinds speak in unmistakably American voices, but the importance of their contributions to Western culture had come to be recognized the world over. Further evidence of the validity of the melting-pot model was provided by the emergence of film, jazz, musical comedy, modern dance, and abstract-expressionist painting, each the product of a complex process by which the contributions of many cultures were blended into a new, indigenously American art form or idiom. Thus did the center of cultural gravity in the West shift from an exhausted, war-torn Europe to the United States, which retained its cultural vitality by assimilating outside influences without sacrificing the guiding vision of a common American identity.Warnings that this vision might be under assault from within were first voiced in the 1970's by neoconservatives (and certain like-minded liberals), who saw a threat to the common culture in the teachings of a new generation of left-wing intellectuals, most of them academics, who were opposed to the traditional understanding of America as a melting pot of ethnic identity. Not until the 80's, however, did their activities come to be more widely seen as a major problem in the making.
Those were the days when William J. Bennett, then President Reagan's Secretary of Education, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the best-selling Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), were pointing with alarm to such empirical evidence of educational decline in America as the results of the First National Assessment of History and Literature, which revealed that 60 percent of eleventh-graders could not identify the author of Leaves of Grass and did not know that the purpose of The Federalist was to "gain ratification of the United States Constitution." Even then, however, the problem was initially framed not as a Kulturkampf, a "war" on the common American culture, but as a mere failure of public-school teachers to do their jobs adequately. Hirsch, who was not a political conservative, went out of his way to reject "the assumption that I must be advocating a list of great books that every child in the land should be forced to read."
Hollywood film grew acutely out of the desire to escape American copyright and patent laws, and we embarrass ourselves if we praise its anarchic energies and populist tributaries without also taking a beat to criticize the total creative poverty of 99.99999% of American film; jazz is the music of an enslaved (and later, lucky for them, merely exploited and co-opted) people who have historically had a few things to say about 'The Western tradition'. Those picked nits aside, the main problem here is that Teachout's vision of blogging, along with his vision of American culture in general, pretends to be that of an inclusive community - he makes this claim in as many words later in the Commentary piece - but it is in fact merely clubbish, ideological, and it is so because fundamentally he's not the populist he (presumably) feels he is. Ch-check it:
The rise of [the 'Pro-Life'] movement also had another, unforeseen effect: raising the consciousness of countless Americans who had hitherto held no settled view on the issue, but were now forced to choose sides.
'Raising the consciousness' of Americans is not the way I'd put it. This reactionary movement is as exclusive, divisive, and frankly unholy as anything going today. The pro-life movement is anti-populist because it holds to an imaginary eternal verity precisely because it is imaginary and 'eternal'. Otherwise the 'fetuses are alive and their lives are worth more than those of, say, condemned prisoners' position, which strikes me as pretty much lunatic on face, would be totally untenable. To stretch a metaphor: Teachout's nostalgia for consensus culture has the same problem. Who's responsible for destroying all that's good and pure about America? 'Leftist intellectuals! That's who.' And what is Hollywood's, and the high art world's, and the jazz world's, overall political dispensation? (Tiny print now...) 'A little smidgen to the left.' And intellectuals really have that power? 'Oh absolutely!' Name a contemporary intellectual with the influence of, say, Thomas Fucking King of All the Flat Earth Friedman.
'...'
I'm being a little scattershot here but I can't help it - there's something at work here that pisses me off no end. The more inclusive and 'populist' Teachout pretends to be - hell, truly believes he is - the more galling his pretensions dare to become. Don't believe me? Google "terry teachout hip hop". This lover of 'big tent' Americanism, or the myth of it anyhow, doesn't seem to know word one about one of our key international aesthetic forces. (Don't believe me still? Check out his review of 8 Mile - not a good film, sure, but he's not actually interested in the film - yet another reactionary who hates guilt more than sin. Read between those loping lines!)
Actually, here's another bit of wisdom from our boy T.T., which ran in one of our more evenhanded, non-ideologically-hidebound arts periodicals of note:
"Twenty years [after it began], rap has become the largest selling category of recorded music. . . . As for the actual content of rap, nobody talks about it much anymore—it seems far, far longer than seven years ago that Bill Clinton made political hay by attacking Sister Souljah—and it may well be that the sickening excesses of gangsta rap have become as untrendy as Austin Powers's wardrobe. If so, one can only be thankful. But whatever the latest nuances of fashion, hip-hop today remains more or less what it was in 1979: a hard, graceless half-music stripped of all semblance of melody and harmony, existing solely as a vehicle for unpolished couplets." Terry Teachout, National Review, February 22, 1999.
Pardon me my own moment of gracelessness: that is some fucking tone-deaf bigoted shit. [And I know you're not supposed to toss around the word 'bigot'. But it springs to mind. Presumptuous? Sure. Pay me to do this stuff(!) and I'll be as genteel as vanilla ice cream. And yes: this passage was edited since I first posted it.]
Actually I had wanted to go paragraph-by-paragraph with the Commentary piece, but oddly enough, it's not worth it for two unrelated reasons. On the one hand, the general critique of Teachout's piece is pretty straightforward: when it comes to his vision of American culture, he's not preserving the grand heritage of American populism, he's perpetuating yet another class-bound system of taste hierarchies, at least partly in opposition to which the liveliest arts have sprung up over the last century - which arts, in turn, the buttoned-up high art culture has happily co-opted, repackaged, homogenized, legitimated, and generally lightened (here or there). (Someday our man Terry will write about acceptable hip hop 'masterpieces', quite possibly, but Fear of a Black Planet isn't making it into the canon, I'm guessing.)
Second: the stuff about blogging, on the other hand, is both reasonable and unaffecting (i.e. a little boring). Sure, you get some windy eutopian blogs-are-changing-everything rhetoric (there are several different myopias of which this tiresome rhetoric is a symptom; at times I've definitely fallen prey to a few of them, but if the diseases persist, this manifestation I'm happy to be rid of). But by and large it's just the usual mix of conservative pot-shots and banal-sounding misrepresentations ('Talk radio, the Fox News Channel, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, private secondary schools, religious colleges, the burgeoning home-schooling network: all these are aspects of a collective end-run around a liberal establishment whose favor conservatives no longer seek to curry'), self-serving fantasies of access to higher aesthetic truths ('Though artbloggers, like artists themselves, tend to have, and to express, left-of-center political views, most are resolutely anti-ideological when it comes to the making of actual critical judgments. This, I find, is no less true of those artbloggers who are themselves academics'), and weird elisions of the difference between self-empowerment and mere ego-gratification ('Similarly, About Last Night allows me to post spontaneously and immediately in response to newsworthy events: the death of an artist, the announcement of a major literary award, a performance from which I have just returned. Just as important, it allows me to decide which of these events are newsworthy, rather than having to talk an editor into letting me write about them, or being talked by an editor into writing about them, often days or weeks after the fact'). For a guy seemingly enamoured of the Myth of the Autodidact/Polymath, Teachout is hardly either of those things.
On the other hand, Terry Teachout is an eloquent speaker on behalf of a technology - and its associated many, many, many cultures - that is very early in its maturation. The things about his writing (and the glimpses of his personal predilections) that I find repellent can be separated from the important, influential parts of his online persona. At day's end, we do need lovers of art to step forward and make the blog world work for them, personally, idiosyncratically, in or out of whatever aesthetic circles they choose. That T.T.'s particular aesthetic/lifestyle vibe is silly to me isn't the point (and to the extent that my disagreements with his work-to-work taste in art colour my judgment of his seriousness as a critic, I apologise for my immaturity - hey, I'm New At This). The dream of a shared, 'pure' American culture is one both optimistic and damnedly exclusive - an ex post facto rationalization for the mere tribal longings and bitterness and cliquishness and xenophobia that have characterized the history of this proud, fascinating nation. It animates us to good and bad. American Culture is make-believe, a dream, like God, like 'equality', and though that doesn't make it any less true and real - are you following me here? - we shouldn't fool ourselves about the historical contingency and selfish motives of that dream. Teachout is an eloquent spokesman and passionate, essentially well-meaning man working on the side of an aesthetic/cultural ideology that he advertises better than he understands.
And you know what? In the end, he can say his shit, I can say mine. Hell, we link to one another (at least until he reads this?). Democracy may be goofy as hell but it's here, it's queer, get used to it.
