The Books of My Life: Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits

 

I have long been impressed by the work of historical, social, and cultural geographies. Some of the most impressive theoretical and substantive works--not to mention dense works--I have read on comparative and American history, for instance, have been by historical and cultural geographers like Donald Meinig and Wilbur Zelinsky. I can now add another name to the list of superb historical and cultural geographers and social scientists, the late University of Toronto historical geographer James Lemon.

Lemon's Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits: Great Cities of North America since 1600 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996) is a geographic, economic, political, cultural, and demographic of the transition from traditional rural societies with their kin centred economic and political organisation and culture to a modern and a postmodern society of rich core nations characterised by laissez faire liberalism, at least in theory if not in practise thanks to state wealthfare, corporate capitalism, the movement from household production to work outside the home, the rise of bureaucratic manufacturing, retailing, and financial institutions, the increasing dominance of the retail sector, and increasing fragmentation and cultural complexity. Lemon tells this broader story of the transition from traditional society to modern and postmodern society by focusing on the geographic, economic, political, cultural, demographic aspects of six North American cities: Philadelphia around 1760, Manhattan around 1860, Chicago around 1910, Los Angeles around 1950, and Toronto around 1975. Lemon shows how the human striving for comfort, convenience, and safety led, in core nations, to the rise of an urban consumer society that by the Great Depression if not by the late nineteenth century had pushed up against the limits of economic growth imposed by nature resulting in economic stagnation in the core nations, an economic stagnation that has not been alleviated by the rise of a new communication culture and social formation associated with the new digital media, postmodernism.

Some, like me, will find Lemon's explorations of the differences between two core nation settler societies, the United States and Canada, both of which I have lived in over the course of my life, among the most interesting aspects of Lemon's superb book. As Lemon notes, Canada, unlike the United States, has been characterised by a less anti-governmental culture and ideology and hence less resistant to social democracy even among its Tories ("Red Tories"), social welfare, rational planning, and regulations on the economic sector, and transitioned earlier to postmodernism than did the US. As Lemon notes, these differences matter and are the reason Canada and Toronto are are less divided by economic divides of income and wealth, have lower levels of economic, cultural, and geographic segregation, have public housing in the suburbs, have stronger central cities and inner cities, are more rationally ordered, have more metropolitan political forms, and are less characterised by the geographic and economic urban transition the Chicago sociologists noticed in Chicago, than is the US.

Mandatory reading for anyone interested in comparative history, the comparative history of the US and Canada, the history of settler societies, and urban history.

Musings on Variations in the Political "Right" and the Political "Left"

If the radical right has its cultural origins in Christianity, populist violence, and theocratic laissez-faire liberalism, libertarianism has its origins, like liberalism, in the Enlightenment. This makes libertarianism very different from conservatism since conservatism was a reaction against the Enlightenment.

Libertarians are also different from the radical right. They have different historical origins and libertarianism has never really been fully theocratic in its conception of the limited state or in its its morality and it has had a long intellectual, including a secular intellectual, culture. As a result, there have long been tensions between libertarians and the religious right. After all the radical right favours a regulatory state that regulates, for example, morality.

As I noted, the radical right, historically speaking, has engaged in and continues to engage in all sorts of regulatory legislation from, for example, not allowing Austin, Texas to pass laws that it wants and which its legislators were elected to pass by having the Texas legislature cancel it, to moral regulation such as, for example, religious based discrimination and laws against trans people. Historically speaking the radical right pushed for and often passed legislation against "sodomy", mandating the "missionary position" in sex, making alcohol illegal, making pot illegal, and cancelling certain types of political discourse such as communism and anarchism. Libertarians, it seems to me, should be very concerned about such a regulatory or paternalistic nanny state.

This regulatory aspect of the radical right is one of the axes that separates libertarianism from the radical right. These regulations are all examples of the paternalistic nanny state. By the way, I think one can argue that historically all nanny states, regardless of political persuasion, are equivalent in form though sometimes different in content. If forced to choose I would take a secular nanny state over a religious theocratic one including that of the Bolsheviks, who instituted a new religion and religious like culture in the USSR. Religious nanny states have a tendency to go all inquisitorial a la The Handmaid's Tale, a la the Spanish Inquisition (which everyone should expect from right wing theocrats), and a la the Stalinist purge trials.

Liberals and the left, like the radical right and libertarianism, have very different origins. Liberals are the product of the early Enlightenment whether they are the laissez faire liberals of Smith or the more regulatory liberals of JS Mill (greatest good for the greatest number). Regardless, of their type of liberalism they are capitalists as Democrat Nancy Pelosi noted in a famous remark. Democrat social liberal FDR saved capitalism from, some would argue, its boom-bust self.

The left whether Christian communalists (the first socialists I know of along with the Essenes though they did not call themselves socialist) or the modern Christian socialists, communal socialists, collectivist socialists (the most successful being the kibbutzim), democratic socialists a la the Nordic countries, or communists, all the product of the later Enlightenment, want to move beyond capitalism whether through reform or historical "progress". This makes them very different from liberals. It also makes them different from conservatives who are generally much more skeptical of notions of "progress" compared to the left and to liberals. Liberals, of course, argue that capitalism in either its "free" or more regulated form will bring about heaven on earth, utopia

There are, by the way, places where libertarianism and communist varieties of "scientific" socialism meet. Marx claimed that the state would wither away when communism triumphed. This makes him a kind of anarchist, a left libertarian, and perhaps more libertarian than many contemporary libertarians.

The Books of My Life: The Dream Life

J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003) takes readers on an Alice in Wonderland like journey through the old and new myths of the American sixties from the late fities to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kraucauer, Marshall McLuhan, Benedict Anderson, and Jean Baudrillard, Hoberman explores how American myths or American dreams fed into American films including those of Hollywood, and how those films in turn created and recreated American myths.

Starring in Hoberman's sixties film dream life and filmic waking life cosmic manichean American melodrama are a number of celebrity star-pols. There is John F. Kennedy, America's own James Bond, secret agent man whose mission it is to help save the third world from evil tyranny in his own version of The Magnificent Seven (1960). There is Barry Goldwater the Cowboy from Arizona, a waking life version of the paternalistic John Wayne in McLintock (1963). There is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Cowboy from Texas who fancies himself in the John Wayne roles in The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968). There is Richard Milhous Nixon, the waking life's own General Patton of Patton (1970). And there are those scores of left wing, liberals turned conservatives, and right wing righteous outlaws and vigilantes who imagine themselves as Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the two drug selling bikers in Easy Rider (1969), Joe in Joe (1970), and Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), and Harry in Dirty Harry (1971) and the Stranger in High Plains Drifter (1973).

Hoberman's historical, sociological, and cultural anthropological approach to the American dream life and its moving mythic dreams is a welcome remedy to an academic film criticism obsessed with the Freudian dream life. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in American culture, the sixties, cinema, and nationalistic religion. Needless to say the dream life and the dreams that inhabit America's waking life are still with us today. President Donald Trump, for instance, seems to fancy himself a righteous cowboy wearing a white hat (pun intended), a righteous outlaw, and a righteous vigilante of the John Wayne persuasion, all at the same time. When you scratch beneath the ideological dream and find the reality, however, it is clear that Trump is actually Marion Morrison, the man who was lucky enough not to have to serve in any war other than a Hollywood war and the man who came to believe that he embodied the dream life myth Hollywood and America had him play in his waking life. We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.

The Books of My Life: Mise-en-Scène

As I have mentioned before I am and have long been a cinephiliac. I grew up watching, along with my sister, film after film in the afternoons and evenings on the television, something that was easy to do back in the "good old days" when you could watch film after film on network era television. Eventually my film watching morphed into reading about films. I got Leonard Maltin's film guide when it first came out and when I found Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films in a used bookstore I bought it, read it, and was blown away by it. I still am.

When I went away to college my film watching and film education continued. Bloomington, home of Indiana University, was a cinephile's paradise when I was a student there. One could watch classic Hollywood films on the big screen at the Union, Hollywood and foreign films at the Monroe County Library where the Bloomington Film Society set up shop, and mostly foreign films at the various locations around Bloomington where the Ryder held film court. I also occasionally went to the night time showings of films for the many film classes at IU. I was in heaven. I had achieved nirvana.

Though I didn't major in Film I did take the occasional film class with Harry Geduld, Peter Bondanella, and James Naremore. I have very fond memories of studying with all three and of Naremore taking me and a few other classmates upstairs in Ballantine Hall to view Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo frame-by-frame. Like so many during the era I, though I was brought up on the auteurist and Movie approaches to film analysis and film criticism, fell in with the semiotics crowd, something easy to do as IU was one of the centres for the study of semiotics and semiology in the world at the time, and I took a graduate seminar with Naremore on the semiology of film. I never forgot my love of the Movie approach to film criticism, however, and it is not surprising that late in life I find myself returning to it.

John Gibbs, a third generation Movieite, in his Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (New York: Wallflower, Short Cuts series, 2002), argues that it is mise-en-scène, film style, that defines a film's meaning, and that a close study of film style, regardless of the type of film--commercial or artistic--is essential if critics and film goers are to fully understand a film and fully understand how meaning is constructed and works in films. We can't tell anyone what a film is trying to say to us, writes Gibbs, if we do not comprehend what a film is trying to say to us through its mise-en-scène.

Gibbs's book tries to provide film critics and film goers with a method by which they can understand what a film is trying to say. In Chapter One Gibbs offers a definition of mise-en-scène, anything in the frame and the way what is in the frame is organised. In Chapter Two Gibbs explores the interaction between mise-en-scène and other elements of a film such as narrative and editing. In Chapter Three Gibbs argues that the interaction between all the elements of a film creates, a la V.F. Perkins, in good films, coherence. In Chapter Four Gibbs explores the relationship between mise-en-scène and film authorship, arguing, like other Movieites before him, that a directors signature in Hollywood commercial films can sometimes be discerned in how a director organises the elements of a film, particularly in how he or she organises his or her mise-en-scène. This claim that Hollywood had director auteurs, by the way, was something that was controversial in the 1960s and 1970s given that many critics assumed  that Hollywood produced commercial and that such popular entertainments were not authored. In Chapter Five Gibbs explores the important role mise-en-scène plays in melodramas, particularly the domestic melodramas of Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, and Nicholas Ray, types of films that often emphasise mise-en-scène adding, in the process, complexity to the meaning or meanings of a film. In Chapter Six Gibbs brings all of the above to bear on an analysis of a scene in Douglas Sirk's famous melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), and its meanings. In an appendix Gibbs provides readers with a brief annotated history of mise-en-scène criticism.

Gibbs's Mise-en-Scène should be required reading for anyone interested in film and in film meanings. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in culture, criticism, film in general, and Hollywood films of the classic era in particular. That said, not everyone will find all of Gibb's arguments compelling. Some will, for example, wonder about the validity of the assertion that meaning can be discerned and explored in films without an understanding of a films broader social and cultural contexts.

Musings on the Death of Liberalism and the Triumph of the Corporate State

I recently had my Comparative History class read Chris Hedges's book The Death of the Liberal Class. I had not read it before, which is one of the reasons I had my class read it. I have wanted to read Death for sometime and assigning it to a class for reading and discussion seemed a good way to make myself read a book and to get class discussion going about what has happened in the US since the "Reagan Revolution".

Hedges nicely lays out the thesis of The Death of the Liberal Class in the first chapter of the book, “Resistance”. In that chapter Hedges argues that the liberal class, which, he claims, arose as a response to the decline of feudalism and church totalitarianism, has, over the last thirty years of neo-liberal dominance, betrayed its very reason for being. Once the defenders of the rule of law, the supremacy of supreme reason, universal moral values, individualism, and moral egalitarianism, the liberal class has, argues Hedges, become, since the Thatcher and Reagan "revolutions", complicit with the corporate state. The liberal class in good corporate state fashion, claims Hedges, has helped purge leftists, leftists who once kept it honest, from its midst and from American mainstream political and economic culture in general. In the process it has given up its once cherished belief in human progress, and it has allowed the virulent right to capture populist rage, legitimate populist rage, against the government and against Wall Street. This failure of the liberal class has, argues Hedges, left the poor that the liberal class once sought to protect and whose vulnerable position it once sought to meliorate through social insurance and regulatory schemes, particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of capitalist oligarchic boom and bust society.

With the triumph of the corporate state a contradiction has reared its ugly head in Corporate State America, claims Hedges. Liberals, claims Hedges, are necessary to maintain several cherished liberal myths including the belief that everyone in America has an equal opportunity to become a millionaire or at least have a comfortable middle class life, and the myth that constitutional reforms that benefit the disenfranchised are possible through legal channels. After its successful purge of the American left by the corporate state, a purge founded on fears generated by the corporate state about communism, anarchism, and socialism, however, the corporate state, which always requires an enemy, has now turned its ire on its once liberal ally in the war against the left, and made it, the new internal enemy, an internal enemy, they claim, that is undermining the American way of life.

By turning liberals into the enemy at home, however, the corporate state has lost the buffer that liberals once provided, thanks to its promises of the possibility of reform and progress, between it and those who haven't by and large benefited from the joys of corporate America. And now that those liberal myths, liberal myths that were once partially true, that myth that every American can live the American dream and that the legal system can protect us from the worst aspects of corporate oligarchy, have been shattered, many populists, many disenfranchised populists, perhaps even without realizing it consciously, are angry at liberalism for failing them.

All of this has left liberals in a precarious position. Today all emasculated liberals can do is to go along with the main political arm of the corporate state, the Republican Party, and support things like deregulation, including deregulation of the banks, the elimination of firewalls between investment banks and commercial banks, acts that let loose casino capitalist speculators, welfare "reform", anti-union and anti-working class free trade agreements which have destroyed American manufacturing, the American working class, and American unions. And all the while, claims Hedges, they still haven’t fully recognised the obvious, that in the wake of the Reagan Revolution corporate elites fully control America ever more firmly, corporate elites who aren’t interested in the common good but only in their own financial gain, and that reforming this American corporate state is almost impossible. What we are left with, claims Hedges, using a term first used by political observer Sheldon Wolin, is “inverted totalitarianism”.

Hedges argues that liberal complicity with the constantly at war corporate state has corrupted once liberal churches, colleges and universities, artists, the media, and labour leaders all of whom have been allowed, by corporate oligarchs and their political minions, to play roles in the corporate state if they don’t play the class war card (think here about the criticism of Obama by Republicans for fanning the flames of class war recently). All of these once liberal institutions now speak the language of corporate accountability, of individualism and self-realisation, of getting ahead, and of the need for war, rather than the language of justice for the disenfranchised. Universities and colleges have become a breeding ground for systems managers for the political and economic bureaucracies of the corporate state. Professors gaze into texts as though they were crystal balls, praise multiculturalism, which is not a threat to the corporate elites, and write essays and tomes in languages that only they can understand rather than damn the inequality and injustice around them. Artists ever more detached from the wider world in which they live, have traded in social realism and a call for justice for abstraction and detachment from social issues.

After reading Hedges's The Death of the Liberal Class I have been thinking a lot about the liberal class and, in particular, about the academic liberal class. Some of the most incisive analyses of bourgeois academics and intellectuals, at least for me, are contained in two films made by Luis Bunuel, The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). I have always found the characterisation of bourgeois dinner parties, bourgeois dinner parties as the opiates of the wanna be aristocratic less than masses (academic dinner parties have a bit more trendy intellectual and academic discussion), in both films to be a fairly accurate representation of this ritual.

I have to admit, nihilist that I am quickly becoming, that I am somewhat amused and bemused by academia, or at least parts of academia--I consider myself more of an intellectual who has been fortunate to be able to teach part time in the ivy halls (though perhaps, after writing this, not for much longer). I am amused and bemused by the apparent fact that some academics seem to think that by writing about (an imagined) ageism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, essays read by perhaps 200 people, they can change the world into an (equally imagined) utopia.

While "left leaning" academics have been navel gazing the right has, as Hedges notes, out manoeuvered them capturing, like pied pipers, the public discourse and the rhetorical contours of governmental policy (the government as evil rhetoric) and has used these as springboards to political power. As I write the corporate right is now living out its wet dream of cutting government, cutting education (ah, good old American anti-intellectualism or anti-higher education), and savaging the few unions that remain somewhat visible and viable in America today. Amidst the neo-liberal carnage academics, leftists, and social insurance liberals stand like deers before headlights. Occupy Wall Street is (was?) perhaps the only realistic attempt by those on the left to assault and escape this prison house of neo-liberal public rhetoric. It will be interesting to see whether OWS has provided the key by which liberalism can escape the gilded neo-liberal cage they have been imprisoned within and by which the American left can be reborn on a broader and less sectarian scale. At the moment it looks such a prospect doesn't have a proverbial snow balls chance in hell since, at least according to several polls more people fear big government than big corporate business and more people think the US is more a country of haves than of have nots. Apparently many Americans tune out any talk about inequality in America because they believe it to be inherently liberal or inherently socialist in nature. What can I say, ideological illusions generally trump reality.