"People went around saying, 'He who dies with the most toys wins'.... People said it in a way that suggested they didn’t really believe it..."

"... but it wasn’t clear then what they really did believe. The culture didn’t seem to be offering many alternatives. You can dispose of discretionary dollars in various ways. If you were a yuppie, you spent them on yourself. You consumed conspicuously. That’s what the yuppie-haters hated most about the yuppies. You bought things you didn’t need and paid extra for the brand: Sasson jeans, Frette linens, Cross pens, Rolex watches, Perrier water, Aprica strollers. Faux high-end imports emerged—Grey Poupon mustard (then owned by RJR Nabisco), Häagen-Dazs ice cream (invented in the Bronx).... Food became a highly cathected consumable.... The more entrepreneurial yuppies colonized abandoned row houses and warehouse loft spaces, and used some of their leisure time to work out. Fitness and self-care were big.... The yuppie strode forth from the economic wreckage of the nineteen-seventies: two oil crises, mortgage rates at thirteen per cent, a huge loss of manufacturing jobs in major industries like steel and cars, a stock market in the doldrums. When the economy recovered, in the early nineteen-eighties, it was easy for people to feel rich without feeling guilty. They had seen what it was like to worry about money. Spending it felt liberating...."

From "When Yuppies Ruled/Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professional tell us about our own?" by Louis Menand (The New Yorker).

"When psychologists asked what sort of habits and choices were markers of creativity, they came up with things like 'divergent thinking' and 'tolerance for ambiguity.'"

"They reported that, on tests, creative people preferred abstract art and asymmetrical images. ... [T]hose preferences also happened to match up with the tastes of the mid-century educated classes. To put it a little more cynically, the tests seem to have been designed so that the right people passed them.... [In 'The Cult of Creativity,' Samuel W.] Franklin argues that the appeal of workplace creativity was that it addressed two anxieties about modern life: conformity and alienation. Postwar intellectuals worried about the 'organization man' (the title of a book by the journalist William Whyte) and the 'other-directed' personality (diagnosed in the sociologist David Riesman’s 'The Lonely Crowd'). These were seen as socially dangerous types. People who did what they were told and who wanted to be like everyone else, who were not 'inner-directed,' were people easily recruited to authoritarian movements...."

Writes Louis Menand, in "The Origins of Creativity/The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it" (The New Yorker)(discussing ).

You might wonder how Menard argues his way to the notion that "now we're stuck with" individualism and nonconformity. I can't quote the whole article, but it has to do with capitalism capitalizing on the concept of creativity. As Franklin puts it: "The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism." 

"Dickens was a social critic. Almost all his fiction satirizes the institutions and social types produced by that dramatic transformation of the means of production."

"But he was not a revolutionary. His heroes are not even reformers. They are ordinary people who have made a simple commitment to decency. George Orwell, who had probably aspired to recruit Dickens to the socialist cause, reluctantly concluded that Dickens was not interested in political reform, only in moral improvement: 'Useless to change institutions without a change of heart—that, essentially, is what he is always saying.' In fact, a major target of Dickens’s satire is liberalism.... [I]n nineteenth-century England the typical liberal was a utilitarian, who believed that the worth of a social program could be measured by cost-benefit analysis, and very likely a Malthusian.... One of Dickens’s memorable caricatures in 'Bleak House' is Mrs. Jellyby.... We see her at home obsessively devoted to her 'Africa' project, while neglecting, almost criminally, her own children.... But Dickens is not ridiculing Mrs. Jellyby for caring about Africans. ... [S]he was based on a woman Dickens had met, Caroline Chisholm, who operated a charity called the Family Colonization Loan Society, which helped poor English people emigrate. And Mrs. Jellyby’s project is the same: she is raising money for families to move to a place called Borrioboola-Gha, 'on the left bank of the Niger,' so that there will be fewer mouths to feed in England. She’s a Malthusian. "

From "The Crisis That Nearly Cost Charles Dickens His Career/The most beloved writer of his age, he had an unfailing sense of what the public wanted—almost" by Louis Menand (The New Yorker).

"A major influence on Jimmy Wales’s conception of [Wikipedia] was an essay by Friedrich Hayek called 'The Use of Knowledge in Society'..."

"... published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism.... Hayek’s argument about knowledge is... markets are self-optimizing mechanisms.... This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge...." 

 From "Wikipedia, 'Jeopardy!,' and the Fate of the Fact/In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge" by Louis Menard (The New Yorker).

NYT creates a video montage to demonstrate that Trump talks like George Wallace.

Check it out:



The main thing seems to be the phrase "law and order." It would help the anti-Trump cause quite a bit if people would believe the phrase "law and order" signals white supremacy. It's easy to do the counter-spin however: It is racist to hear "law and order" as white supremacy.

Accompanying that video montage is this article — "A Half-Century After Wallace, Trump Echoes the Politics of Division/George Wallace’s speeches and interviews from his 1968 campaign feature language and appeals that sound familiar again as the 'law and order' president sends federal forces into the streets" by Peter Baker:

The president rails about the “anarchists and agitators” and accuses “the radical left” of running rampant through the streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.”...

Like Mr. Trump, Wallace denounced “anarchists” in the streets, condemned liberals for trying to squelch the free speech of those they disagreed with and ran against the elites of Washington and the mainstream media....

Like the pugnacious Mr. Trump, Wallace enjoyed a fight. Indeed, he relished taking on protesters who showed up at his events. “You know what you are?” he called out to one. “You’re a little punk, that’s all you are. You haven’t got any guts.”

MEANWHILE: At the New Yorker, they're talking about Joe McCarthy because — don't you know?! — Trump is like Joe McCarthy. The article, by Louis Menand, is "Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods/McCarthy never sent a single 'subversive' to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures." Excerpt:

Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy.... He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was.... To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong.... He was... a conspiracy-monger.... What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy.... McCarthy lied all the time.... He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

Trump is like McCarthy, who loved chaos, and Trump is like George Wallace, who loved law and order. Oh, that Trump — he's everything you need him to be.

"The cover of the Post was a photograph of a slightly sinister man, looking like a dealer, in a top hat and face paint—an evil Pied Piper."

"That photograph was what the Diggers meant by 'media poisoning.'"



The Diggers refused to talk to Joan Didion as she tried to gather material in 1967 for the essay that became the famous "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." They discerned (correctly) that she was part of the mainstream media's agenda, demonizing the hippie counterculture, according to Louis Menand in his New Yorker article, "Out of Bethlehem/The radicalization of Joan Didion."

Didion presented her article as an investigation into what she called “social hemorrhaging.” She suggested that what was going on in Haight-Ashbury was the symptom of some sort of national unravelling. But she knew that, at the level of “getting the story,” her piece was a failure. She could see, with the X-ray clarity she appears to have been born with, what was happening on the street; she could make her readers see it; but she couldn’t explain it....

Didion came from a family of Republicans.... [I]n 1960, she began contributing to The National Review, William F. Buckley’s conservative weekly. She wrote pieces about John Wayne, her favorite movie star, and, in the 1964 Presidential election, she voted for Barry Goldwater. She adored Goldwater. It was hardly a surprise that she found Haight-Ashbury repugnant. Her editors at the Post understood perfectly how she would react. They designed the cover before she handed in the piece....

"Matt and Sweat weren’t very good criminals. They were blunt-instrument types."

"Unlike, say, Whitey Bulger, they weren’t the kind of criminal who gets away and lives for years off the fat of his crimes. They were the kind who gets caught and pays the price, and then gets caught and pays the price again."

Part of the reason for this is that people who have spent a substantial part of their life behind bars often don’t know how to function on the outside. Everyone knows the famous cases—Gary Gilmore, Jack Abbott—of parolees who commit terrible crimes for no understandable reason soon after getting out. They’re used to life in lockup, where there are rules for everything. Life without ubiquitous rules freaks them out....

It sounds glib to say that Sweat may have wanted to escape, but never really wanted to be free, at least if freedom means what it means to most of us: staying out of prison. But what would Matt and Sweat most likely have done if they had managed to get to Canada or Mexico or even Vermont?

"Mailer thought that God exists but is not completely in control of his creation. He needs us to help him in his struggle with the Devil."

"How can we help? By acting instinctively and taking risks, on the understanding, as Mailer liked to say, that the best move lies close to the worst. It’s no good choosing a middle path. We have to risk being damned if we hope to save God, preserve our souls for reincarnation, and avoid cancer. The guiding power in all this business is the unconscious, which Mailer thought had 'an enormous teleological sense,' and which he named 'the navigator.'"

Another extract from that subscribers-only New Yorker article by Louis Menand about Norman Mailer. That jumped out at me in part because of the recent excitement over Justice Scalia's revelation that he believes in the Devil.

"I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time."

Said Norman Mailer, quoted in this subscribers-only article by Louis Menand in The New Yorker. As Menand puts it, Mailer "made the way in which events are reported part of what is reported."

ADDED: You could say something similar about law: I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all judicial opinions is that the judge tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time. But what then? No judge can switch to writing the judicial equivalent of New Journalism.

(20 years ago, I tried to write about this problem, here (PDF) — with some quotes from Mailer's "Executioner's Song.")

AND: From that link, above, on New Journalism, which goes to Wikipedia:

How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre is not clear....

But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket. A report of John F. Kennedy's nomination that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago) and in other nonfiction as well.

And here, you can read the full text of "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (at the Esquire website, Esquire having once been a monumentally important magazine). It begins:

For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

Convenient sidebar chez Esquire: 



Are we doomed? Did you go to my link and read the sentences that followed those 3 mindbendingly interesting sentences that began "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," or did you go over to click through to the explanation of why Miss Johansson in the sexiest woman alive (or what a "brutally frank" 98-year-old woman might say about sex)?

"The trouble with Elvis was that he had very little to say; he was mainly concerned about sounding polite."

So you wouldn't want to read a big book of Elvis interviews, quips Louis Menand, who's saying a big book of Dylan interviews isn't much better:

Dylan is rarely concerned about sounding polite, and he says things, but he sometimes makes them up. He also contradicts himself, answers questions with questions, rambles, gets hostile, goes laconic, and generally bewilders. What makes it truly frustrating is that, somewhere in the stream of inconsequence and obstreperousness, there are usually a few nuggets of gold. The nuggets make interviewers think that the other stuff must be a put-on, that Dylan could speak with the tongue of angels all the time if he wanted to, and this makes them press harder, hoping that the next question will break through the misdirection and resistance, and the man in front of them will turn into “Bob Dylan.” Since there is nothing Dylan likes less than being mistaken for “Bob Dylan” — “If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers,” he once said — this is not a productive interview dynamic.

(Yeah, 2 of 3 posts so far this morning are about Bob Dylan. I can't help what washes up with the tide any given morning.)