Browbeaten

     (Photo: Life, 1949) 

A new "battle of the brows" has been taking place in the pages of the New York Times Sunday Book Review during the past few weeks.  On July 29th, Thomas Mallon and Pankaj Mishra entered the ring with two pieces jointly titled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow -- Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?"  For his part, Mallon realizes that the digital democracy we now live in makes those old cultural distinctions more archaic than ever.  (He helpfully points out that the term "highbrow" came into popular use in 1902 by a New York Sun Reporter named Will Irvin, based on the then-faddish science of phrenology, which judged a person's intelligence by the height of his or her forehead; naturally the one with the highest brow was the most intelligent, a theory which Mallon notes has "a certain whiff of racialism and eugenics," which alone should make the term highbrow a no-no in today's more enlightened culture.)  

But the categories of highbrow, lowbrow, and -- most detested by intellectuals for decades  -- middlebrow, no longer exist, as people of diverse cultural backgrounds routinely mix and match YouTube clips, sreaming videos, instragrams, Facebook updates, "reality" TV shows (you'll never see an ostensibly "thoughtful" piece about it without the inevitable quotes around "reality"), pseudo-serious "fact-based" documentaries, the occasional Kindle downloaded -- no pun intended -- with Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Malcolm Gladwell opus, "funny" pictures mocking the celebrity du jour, endless quizes testing whether or not you're a great lover, loner, or loafer, (and yes, blogs), along with iPods loaded up with music of every imaginable kind, each haphazard consumer guided purely by their whims, certainly not any hierarchies of taste.  Could there possibly be room for War and Peace in the midst of this cacophony of images and noise?  (Fear not:  Harvey Weinstein is producing a 6-part TV-miniseries of Tolstoy's novel to be aired in 2015.  But will our distracted age watch 6 hours of fictional 18th-century French aristocrats at war and play?)  Mallon,  as befits a novelist  and critic of undeniable stature, nevertheless calls for maintaining serious distinctions within the realm of criticism while accepting that we live in a rowdy, often vulgar democracy.  But can an aristocracy of critical thought coexist with a leveling political democracy?  Nearly two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his doubts, seeing the American experiment in democracy the template for the future of the rest of the world.  He predicted that democracy will produce many writers of talent, but few if any of genius.  Today, even the word genius has a whiff of politically incorrect elitism .

No Awakening from the Nightmare of Modernism

Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra laments that the high Modernism of the early 20th-century, celebrated by anyone with intellectual pretensions at the time, has resulted in another kind of leveling -- the widespread, relentless, often brutal wiping out of indigenous cultures all around the world; folk songs are replaced by mass-produced pop songs, villages are bulldozed to create sterile highrise apartments, national literatures are gradually supplanted by American TV shows or local imitations of them that are even worse.  The modernist dream of intellectual elites has become the default mode of cultural exchange; today, modernism doesn't mean Kafka and Jackson Pollock, but the high-tech entertainments, buildings, and news-presentations whipped up by the graduates of elite universities (with some help from talented if educated singers, actors, and assorted celebrities) for consumption by the working-class and increasingly declasse middle-class, while the elites themselves are too busy making money to worry about acquiring any serious culture at all. (I've heard more than one doctor, lawyer, and successful professional virtually boast to me that they haven't had "time" to read a book for pleasure since they were in college.  And how many students today read books for pleasure even while in college?)  For Pankaj, our ancestors' dream of modernism has become our nightmare of modernity.

The match continued in the August 1st issue of the Book Review, as A. O, Scott weighed in with "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow: A Resurgence in Inequality and Its Effects on Culture."  For him, the loathsome "middlebrow" culture of the American 1950s seems like a Golden Age in retrospect.  Yet at the time, he observes, intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald denounced what he called "midcult" (from his celebrated essay, "Masscult and Midcult") -- he saw it as an easy way for an expanding middle-class to "acquire" culture without the hard work of actually reading difficult books or grappling with challenging, serious art.  For Macdonald, midcult included Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bells Tolls; the "Book-of-the-Millennium Club" (sic); the Revised Standard Version of the Bible; and Mortimer Adler's Great Books program, to name just four particularly egregious examples.  (Macdonald had particular scorn for the "Syntopicon" volume which came with the set of Great Books -- it meticulously listed where every mention of concepts such as "liberty," "justice," "beauty," "equality," and so on appeared in everyone from Homer to Freud.  Pages numbers for each reference included.)  Macdonald, like Virginia Woolf, had a grudging respect for honest "lowbrow" culture which made no pretensions to offering anything but mindless pleasure; in fact, Woolf saw a kind of virtuous alliance between highbrow aristocrats with working-class lowbrows doing an end-run around the vulgar, grasping, and ever-striving middlebrow middle class.  Here we see the origins, or at at least a striking instance, of radical chic at its self-regarding best.

Keeping Up with the Ernest Joneses

Scott cites Thomas Picketty's "surprise" bestseller Capital in the 21st Century -- journalists are always surprised when a "deep-thought" book becomes a bestseller, though it happens regularly every few years; remember Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind? -- as evidence that the shrinking middle-class is helping to shrink whatever's left of middlebrow culture; and more's the pity, says Scott.  Yes, the categories of high, low, and middle that became so prevalent after the Second World War were, in part, marketing tools -- it helps to know the audience you're trying to sell to -- as well as "markers" for people quickly rising up the economic, social, and cultural ladders.  The car you drove, the books you read (or at least had on your shelf), the plays or musicals you saw, the music you listened to, the stuff you hung on your walls (we're assuming you had walls), all served to show where you were in the great pecking order of postwar American life.  The ability to talk about the latest "serious" bestseller -- David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, let's say -- showed you were a person of education and taste, just as being able to toss off some references to Thomas Picketty's new book at a cocktail party today may gain you brownie points among your new friends.  (See -- some things never change.)  But Scott is not a Virginia Woolf or Dwight Macdonald aesthetic snob.  He's a fine film critic who recognizes that the vanished middlebrow culture also represented genuine efforts by Americans to "better" themselves, to partake of the riches of a culture which has been heretofore reserved only to those with wealth and leisure time.  All those Signet paperbacks of the classics weren't just to impress the neighbors -- they were way stations for millions of people to appreciate writers and thinkers whose works were previously available in expensive hardcover editions for the happy few.  The thought of a very large happy middle-class happy sent shivers of horror down the refined spines of Woolf and Macdonald.

Scott rightly laments the disappearance of the middlebrow film from the Hollywood studios.  Such films were hardly Hiroshima, Mon Amour, but a great many of them had strong scripts, plausible characters, superb acting, and visual pleasures more subtle than the CGI effects of the blockbusters churned out nowadays.  While the vast middle of films -- as well as books, theater, and TV -- has dropped out of the equation, the high (represented by independent films designed for niche audiences) and low (check out what's playing at your multiplex cinema tonight) have  remained, for the most part, the two available options.  One could argue that such movies as the "prestige" films produced by the aforementioned Harvey Weinstein like The King's Speech demonstrate that middlebrow is alive and well, but such films, regardless of well they may or may not be, are a very tiny piece of a very large high/low pie.  And as Scott suggests, even arguing about whether a film or book is highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow, would be inconceivable to young culture consumers today, who blithely mix and morph and post and tweet snippets from everything to everyone, all day long.  Conversations about what's highbrow and what's lowbrow are what their parents or grandparents had during college bull sessions -- at least those of their grandparents who went to college.  Today, going to college isn't even middlebrow anymore -- it's become a virtual luxury item.

Middlebrowism Reconsidered

Scott is not the only one who regrets the middlebrow boom of the postwar years.  Recently Commentary magazine published a piece by Michael J. Lewis, "How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk," which essentially apologized to the perhaps-archetypal middlebrow writer of the 1950s to 1970s and reassessed his entire career, this time acknowledging his genuine novelistic gifts and regretting that the magazine had slighted him for not measuring up to the modernist writers then in vogue among the literary intelligentsia.  Wouk is still going strong at age 99, and working on a new book.  Perhaps those neglected middlebrows have more staying power than anyone suspected.  (Ironically, Wouk's  last novel, The Lawgiver (2012), with its interweaving of emails, text messages, snippets of screenplay, transcripts of conference calls, and even snail mail, to tell the story of the production of a film about Moses, was even described by some critics as -- wait for it -- "postmodern."

A personal note:  I recall from my publishing days a distinction that senior editors made about bad books.  They were either "junk" or "trash," and while junk could be good fun, trash was not worth wasting your time reading (except as part of the job, so that it could be sold to those lesser folks who actually enjoyed trash).  In the late 1960s, film critic Pauline Kael published her famous 1969 Harper's essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies," in which she celebrated trash, was suspicious of art (arty movies, at any rate), and rejoiced that movies were a form that was ecstatically "beyond" both trash and art.  All of this now sounds so old and quaint.  No wonder A. O. Scott is nostalgic.  We're drowning in the vast, undifferentiated culture bog, as it becomes increasingly clear that the only kind of status that really impresses anyone these days is not cultural or even social.  It's just having money.  Lots of it.  Nobrow* is the only brow that's left.

*From Lowbrow to Nobrow is actually the name of a book by Peter Swirksi, published in 2005.

Exceptional? Or "Indispensable"?

(Painting: "Spirit of America," Norman Rockwell, 1979)

On Friday afternoon, CNN reported that, during his press conference at the White House earlier that day, President Obama declared that America is "indispensable" to the world in such crises as the current ones in the Middle East because "we're willing to plunge in and try where other countries don't bother trying." 

This may come as something of a surprise to those who remember Obama's view of "American exceptionalism" as something he, well, took exception to; who remember him saying at the NATO summit in France last year that "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism," and other occasions when he seemed to play down or dismiss the "myth of American exceptionalism.  Certainly many liberals, leftists, and Obama supporters have voiced the same disbelief in a uniquely American exceptionalism, and in fact many essays on the pervasiveness of this "myth" have been penned by fierce critics of the idea, who worry that it breeds chauvinism and an attitude that "America doesn't have to play by the same rules" as other nations. So Obama's recent comments may cause some to wonder: Is there a difference between being "indispensable" and being "exceptional'? Is the former word just a softer, more  utilitarian way of expressing the latter?  Is "indispensable" simply a more down-to-earth sounding notion, conjuring up a vision of an America ready to roll up its sleeves and help the world (but only when called-upon), while "exceptional" implies an almost metaphysical sense of entitlement?  Perhaps Obama has been reading James Flexner's 1994 biography of our first president, Washington: The Indispensable Man.  (If being indispensable was good enough for Washington, it must be good enough for America.)   You can be sure the White House speechwriters have mulled this over during more than one brainstorming session.

Actually, Friday wasn't the first time Obama moved away from his previous skepticism about the idea of American exceptionalism. In the video clip above, taken during Obama's speech to the graduating class at West Point in May, he pointedly said, ""America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will" And in the final debate of the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama stated "America remains the one indispensable nation, and the world needs a strong America." Needless to say, Obama also told the West Pointers that military action is not always necessary or wise, that we must "act with restraint," and that collective action is preferable to America going it alone; and he added after his debate remark about America's strength the admittedly self-serving comment "and it is stronger now than when I came into office." But Obama has been saying this sort of thing for some time now.  Is it pure politics, a convenient way to wave the flag to get re-elected in 2012 or to get fellow Democrats elected in 2014?  Or has he really come to appreciate that there's something America brings to the table that no other nation does, that it is indeed, exceptional -- or "indispensable,"  If so, it would be a major leap in Obama's thinking -- exceptionalism suggests far more than merely being indispensable ("Jim is an indispensable part of our corporate team.")  Has Obama become -- shut the barn doors, Mabel -- a neoconservative?  Or is his rhetoric, as is the way of politics, a mixture of both?  Skeptics should rightly remain skeptical -- especially of political language.  Time for us all to reread George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language."  For the time being, our president has designated America as indispensable, but not inherently exceptional.  At least the Greeks -- not the ancients, but the modern ones -- will be relieved.

In any event, I have no doubt that the debate about American exceptionalism will continue for a long time, not least among those who believe that America is exceptional for its wickedness, not its goodness. I suspect that you, gentle reader, lean towards one or the other. For myself, I'll paraphrase a line from Pauline Kael's famous essay on Orson Welles: "In a less confused world, its glory would be greater than its guilt.

Bernard-Henri Levy: The Ugly Tide Washing Across Europe

(Photo: Ouest France)

French writer and perennially controversial public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy brings his usual crystal clarity to the crisis in Gaza. In his July 30th article in the Wall Street Journal, Levy notes the wave of anti-Semitism now washing over Europe, replete with pro-Palestinian protesters shouting "Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the Gas!" -- which vividly shows that the oft-mentioned "distinction" between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is, in practice, a distinction without a difference.

In the 1984 film The Little Drummer Girl, based on John Le Carre's novel, there's a scene where Diane Keaton, posing as a recruit to the Palestinian cause, is being "trained" at a Palestinian camp in Southern Lebanon. She's talking to one of the PLO leaders in his cabin, and, as part of her spy act, makes a reference to "those dirty Jews." The PLO leader stops her, raising his hand, saying, "No, listen, we are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic." She looks at him with a sly smile and says, "Yeah, right." Then the PLO leader laughs, and Keaton laughs with him. They both know what the real story is.

Levy rightly points out the relative indifference in Europe over the tens of thousands of Syrians murdered by President Assad -- gassed, shot, obliterated -- as well as the 150 children who were used by Hamas to help build the dozens of underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel who died during their construction, buried under the rubble with no one protesting it in the streets of Paris or anywhere else. Levy's credentials on these issues is beyond reproach: he has spoken out against atrocities committed against Arabs in Darfur, Bosnia, and many other places, as well as supported a Palestinian state for the past fifty years. But he also recognizes that Arabs killing Arabs doesn't rouse the world's indignation; it's when Jews kill Arabs, even to defend themselves against a steady onslaught of rockets and tunnel attacks, that the world sits up and takes notice. In the media it's long been a dictum that "Jews are news." As Levy observes, the world sees Arabs killing Arabs as "normal" -- and Arabs killing Jews as business as usual.

Granted, all people of good will and conscience are disturbed by the civilian casualties incurred by the Gazan Palestinians; but responsible journalists have been careful to explain that the large number of such deaths is in no small part due to the Hamas leaders putting their rockets and bombs in precisely the civilian homes, schools, and hospitals where Israeli retaliation will do the most harm. Perhaps the high-minded citizens of the world expect Israelis to live with a constant barrage of rockets, sixty-second windows of time to get into bomb shelters, and the relentless fear of death falling out of the sky, day after day, year after year. No Europeans or Americans, or most anyone else, would consent to live with such daily terror.

What he does not go on to say -- but others will -- is that Europe has carried the overwhelming burden of guilt for the Holocaust for almost 70 years, and some, though not all, have grown weary of it. The polite agreement that anti-Semitism is out-of-bounds in civilized discourse appears to be breaking down. While there are legitimate criticisms of Israel, and many stalwart friends of Israel in Europe and around the world who have valid criticisms of it, it's not hard to discern an anti-Semitism that doesn't even attempt to disguise itself as anti-Zionism in the recent protests. And this is a development entirely welcomed by, and in fact planned by, Hamas. The plight of actual Palestinian citizens is plainly not their concern.

In the 1970s, Levy published Barbarism with a Human Face, which, together with the release of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, dealt a death-blow to the Paris intellectuals' long-running love-affair with Stalinism and the Soviet Union. He was aided in this long overdue awakening by other members of the so-called nouveau philosophes; and it's gratifying to see Levy continuing to fight against religious and political fanaticism in the second decade of the 21st-century. Barbarism periodically has a face-lift, but its visage cannot hide the brutality which remains all-too-familiar to those who have eyes to see.

Walter Winchell Rhumba

A little musical treat for the first Friday of this new venture.  Where else can you find Xavier Cugat's rendition of the Walter Winchell Rhumba?  The bog spews up many an odd item, and perhaps few odder or more delightful than this?  Who's Xavier Cugat, you ask?  Don't ask.  But who's Walter Winchell, you persist?  The knowledgeable among you already know, but for those who don't, here's a fitting anecdote from the end of Winchell's tumultuous life, when he rode uptown to Columbia University during the student demonstrations in 1968 to observe the action firsthand.  Unfortunately an especially nasty cop rudely shoved Winchell (some say he did even worse), and said something to the effect of, "What the hell are you doing here, old timer?"  Winchell's response was characteristic.  "I'm Walter Winchell," he declared stoutly.  The cop was not only unimpressed, but his blank expression indicated he hadn't a clue who Winchell was.  Walter left the scene forlorn, later telling a friend, "What kind of a world is it where someone hasn't heard of Walter Winchell"?

This kind of world, apparently, for even more people now haven't heard of Walter Winchell.  And yet in his heyday -- the 1930s, 40s, and into the 50s -- Winchell was one of the most famous men in America.  Ostensibly he was a gossip columnist, but he was much more than that:  He was the gossip columnist, the man everyone read, the man PR flack went to with a juicy tidbit about some star or would-be star, hoping that Winchell would put it in his column.  Winchell appeared in movies (usually as himself), was the narrator of the 1958 TV series The Untouchables, had a phenomenally successful radio show (anyone of a certain age, and that doesn't include me, will remember his celebrated opening, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!  Flash!")  And he had a phenomenally unsuccessful TV show later on, when the famous voice was accompanied by an awkward man who "seemed to be screaming at the camera for no good reason," as one observer noted.  Winchell had thought he was King of All Media before Howard Stern claimed the title for himself, but Marshall McLuhan could have told Winchell (if he'd bothered to listen) that the medium is the message and TV just wasn't Winchell's medium.  ("It's called a medium," quipped Fred Allen, another radio man who was immensely famous in his day and nearly forgotten now, "because it's rarely well-done.)  Never mind.  For a longer time than mere mortals deserve, Winchell was read and listened to by virtually every sentient American, and even a few comatose ones as well.  Winchell had a voice that could easily raise the dead.

He'd been a stalwart supporter of FDR during the Depression and World War II, and America loved his take-no-prisoners approach to hitting the Nazis and fascists with everything he had, which was mainly his voice and his column, with its distinctive, breathless ellipses....between his...startling revelations!  But after the war Winchell turned to the new enemy, the Communist threat, and when he loudly supported Senator Joseph McCarthy (and loudly was the only tone Walter knew), he made some new enemies himself among his former fans.  Winchell red-baited with the best of them, going after reds, pinks, fellow travellers, commie dupes, and people he just didn't like.  Winchell must have known his power was fading when the brilliant 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success was released with a blistering portrayal of a Walter Winchell-ish columnist and radio commentator named "J. J. Hunsecker," chillingly played to perfection by Burt Lancaster, backed up by one of Tony Curtis as an ambitious small-time press agent ready to lick Lancaster's hand and much worse if it would get one of his clients a mention in J. J.'s column.  Here's an exchange between Curtis's Sidney Falco and Lancaster's Hunsecker:

Sidney Falco: Sure, the columnists can't do without us, except our good and great friend J.J. forgets to mention that. You see, we furnish him with items.

J.J. Hunsecker: What, some cheap, gruesome gags?

Sidney Falco: You print 'em, don't ya?

J.J. Hunsecker: Yes, with your clients' names attached. That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you - to see their names in my column all over the world. Now, I make it out, you're doing me a favor?... The day I can't get along without a press agents' handouts, I'll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.

The two actors were in top form, and the fact that neither they nor screenwriter Ernest (North by Northwest) Lehman from his novella, with an assist from Clifford Odets, felt the slightest fear of reprisal from the real Winchell suggests that Walter's days were numbered.  But newspapers themselves were dying out even back then -- New York City used to have at least nine dailies -- and even Winchell's own flagship paper went under in 1963.  Soon gossip columnists like Liz Smith were learning to make nice about celebrities and not be so darn mean.  The whole story is told in full detail in Neal Gabler's definitive biography, Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity, and in fictional form by Michael (Dispatches) Herr in his small but searing book, Winchell.  And you can even see the great Stanley Tucci portray Winchell in the 1998 TV movie directed by the late Paul Mazursky, titled (what else?), Winchell.  That's enough to keep you busy this weekend.

For a time, Walter Winchell was indeed King....of something.  Remember him kindly, for he fought the good fight as well as the bad one(s).  As for Xavier Cugat, that's another story.  Let's rumba.