“The Aquarians and the Evangelicals: How left-wing hippies and right-wing fundamentalists created a libertarian America” is an extract from Brink Lindsey’s book The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture in Reason Online. Lindsey’s assessment of the social history of American through the second half of the 20th century seems to be well grounded. Lindsey’s review of the polarization of American society between New Age liberals and fundamentalist Christian conservatives, equally devoted to self-actualization, authenticity, and emotional experience, is astute and convincing.
Vancouver Island MusicFest 2007
Vancouver Island was good. It must be one of the large folk festivals in Western Canada, with enough sponsors, grants and fan support to be able to get the performers that attract more fans. The Comox Valley Fairground is a good venue, with enough room for half a dozen stages, and camping. The camping is close to the performing area. It seemed quiet to me, but apparently some campers arrived with a sense that they could drink and party all night, which made security a minor challenge. The infrastructure was good. They had lots of portable privies, which were cleaned frequently. The camping was in an open paddock, which seems to have good drainage, and they kept lanes open for people to walk to their camps.
There was lots of music. During the day, if one stage wasn’t entertaining, there were other options. The weather was good. I enjoyed the sun, or found shade when the sun was too intense. The temperatures didn’t get above the mid 20’s, the sun was often broken by light cloud, and there were good breezes. I could take or leave some of the headliners. The last couple of main stage acts are for dancing and excitement, and I chose sleep.
American Pie
Sunday evening, July 8, 2007, I heard Don McLean and his band perform American Pie at the Vancouver Island Musicfest (aka Folk Festival). McLean, like Joan Armatrading, Los Lobos, and Bedouin Soundclash, was a headliner, who played one set during the evening concert at the main stage. The performance was professional and competent. McLean’s songs, apart from his version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, and his own song “Vincent” (“Starry Starry Night) were probably not that well known.
Free Range Chicken Snobs
Mick Hume, editor of Spiked, happily skewered Hattie Ellis, author of Planet Chicken in his review, Stop Planet Chicken, I Want to Get Off. He says that if she is able to view the production of abundant cheap food as a bad thing, her values are off. Ellis is not a vegetarian but she thinks that it is only acceptable to kill and eat chickens if they have lived a full and healthy life. The problem with Hattie Ellis’s viewpoint is that she would let her sentimental ideas about the welfare of chickens and her ideas about natural foods interfere with things that have made it possible to provide affordable nutrition to people who don’t have the time to raise free range chickens or the time and money to buy them.
Citizenship
From AL Daily, top of the page on June 26/07, the Commencement Address by Dana Gioia to the graduates of Stanford University on June 17, 2007. Worthwhile and quotable. Speaking of the media and culture in the 1950’s:
I don’t think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.
I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.
The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.
Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.
The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture’s celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.
There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child’s imagination, and we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.
Of course, I’m not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics “show business for ugly people.”
Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.
I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the “Creation of Man.” I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.
When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn’t trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?
Don’t get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.
But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.
The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.
Bitch in the House
The Bitch in the House was a bestselling book in hardcover in 2002, and the first shot in one of the many battles in the so-called American culture wars. In the editor’s postscript to the 2003 paperback edition, she professed satisfaction at having had a dialogue with women. Some of the reviews, friendly and hostile, are on the book’s web site. Megan O’Rourke’s review appeared in Slate.
Made to Stick
Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a pretty good book. It’s marketed as a business book by some major bookstores, but libraries may shelve it under social psychology. The Duke University Business school has promoted it on its web page. Co-author Dan Heath is a consultant in the Duke program. The web site for the book has links to other reviews.
It starts with a retelling of the urban legend of drugged travelers and kidney theft. The authors, the Heath brothers, ask why this story is likely to remembered and repeated. They suggest that the ideas that stick are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories. They work through those 6 concepts, using case studies from business and the general media.
Which corporate mission statements provide a useful framework for decision-making by employees and customers? Southwest Airlines in the low-cost airline. Their customers know it, and the whole organization knows it. The discussion of corporate mission statements is good, and it’s quite funny. The Heath brothers deflate several meaningless and pretentious mission statements, and that has started a sort of buzz on the internet. Their book blog has tracked stories about moronic corporate mission statements.
Remember “where’s the beef”? Remember the urban myth of poisoned halloween candy? Why is sportsmanship a dead idea, and how has the idea of respect for the game replaced it?
The Heath brothers explain why some ideas are believed by some people, and remembered, even if not believed, by most people. They also look at the business end of psychology – which stories get people to buy products, send money to charities, act better, or simplify decisions.
The book provides a good working explanation of the psychology of decision making, which explains why there is more to persuasion than logic. In spite of the bad name given to rhetoric by Aristotle and other classical philosophers, it works.
signandsight.com
signandsight.com has some good writing, a cross-section of writing by European journalists. Not surprisingly, Europeans have a lot to say about the whether the religious and cultural values of Muslim immigrants, including their intolerant approach to other religions, their defensiveness of their religion’s approach to symbols and feminism, can be allowed to supersede secular values. Dutch writer Margriet de Moor’s essay “Alarm Bells in Muslim Hearts”. There is a strong, thoughtful debate under the title of “The Multicultural Issue”. There is recent feature called “Blind Exorcism in Poland”, which reflects on the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great writer, who made promises to the secret police in order to travel and write, but always managed to tell his stories, subverting the regime in the process.
Olive Oil Weekend
My bottle of olive oil became dangerously depleted this weekend. I had run out of burger patties and had spied a box of what I took to be bison burger patties in Thrifties. It was a solid frozen block of ground, and has been in the freezer for 8 months since that regrettable purchase. I thought about using it in a chili, but inspiration took hold on Saturday. I have a venison cookbook by A.D. Livingstone, the food writer for Gray’s Sporting Journal, a magazine for upscale rednecks (think Cy Tolliver in Deadwood). Livingstone had a recipe for venison Moussaka. I used at least a cup of olive oil to sauté two eggplants. Livingstone’s recipe calls for making a sauce with 1 and half cups of milk, and a couple tablespoons each of flour and butter, seasoned with a pinch of nutmeg. If he had said it was a bechamel sauce, I might have passed on the dish as too pretentious, but Livingstone just plugged it into the recipe. Livingstone believes in good food more than redneck values, obviously. My only mistake was using a liberal sprinkle of nutmeg in the bechamel instead of a pinch. It was fair bit of work – slice, dry and sauté eggplant, a cooked meat sauce, a bechamel, and baking it, but not more than baking lasagna.
That started a Greek theme. I haven’t had a Greek salad in ages, and the idea of a salad without lettuce was appealing. I found a recipe called Dad’s Greek Salad at Elise Bauer’s Simply Recipes site. Elise is also a resource for Movable Type fixes. The recipe is larger than I need. I made full recipe of sauce (two tablespoons of lemon juice is the juice of small lemon) and put about 2 thirds in a jar in the fridge, and then used only about one third of the vegetables.
On Sunday I made a simple pasta dish, with chickpeas. A few cloves of garlic, minced, sautéd in olive oil, a can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained, a pile of chopped parsley, fresh ground pepper, all simmered on low heat for half an hour, served on ditali – short macaroni style pasta. I got the recipe from Joseph Orsini’s Italian Kitchen – a nice find in Russell’s (Used) Bookstore.
Everything had left overs – two thirds of the moussaka went in the freezer. Cooking with wine is fun too, if I put the sharp knives away before I open the wine.
Dawkins talks nonsense
Last Sunday, I drove to Ladysmith. I have had a cold, and I didn’t have the energy to ride, so I took a short trip up island. On the radio, Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition, with Enright interviewing Richard Dawkins. The interview is accessible as a Real Audio file – it runs to a little over 36 minutes. The interview was mainly devoted to Dawkins’s identity as a public atheist and his arguments against religion, presented in The God Delusion. Enright gave Dawkins a chance to cover the main themes of the book, challenging him mildly on a few points. Dawkins was consistently polite in his tone, but he lived up to his reputation as an intellectual Rottweiler because he just doesn’t back down or let go.