why

I keep hoping, on some level, that most of my posts are met with exasperation for the reasons I intend; the sense that “oh, for heavens’ sake, all of us already do that!”

I hope that no one reads the daily newspaper with a sense that the stories are autonomous from one another; I hope that everyone reads the TLS or the (sorry, even though I subscribe to the online Eurozine service, in my declining years I tend to forget the names of publications) with the sense that there is a relationship between what is written about archaeology and anthropology and urban studies and reviews of new fiction and essays on sustainable development and studies of nomads in east Africa and analyses of where post-pop music is going. (I don’t recall ever having read a study of “post-popular” music but as with my coinage of the word “post-contemporary” as a joke once, I expect to learn the term has been in common usage for decades.)

Europeans and a good many Americans who get their news from different sources than I do probably absorb this perspective automatically, but one gets one’s mind bent by living in a country in which Wesley Clark’s offhand observation that John McCain’s long-ago season as a heroic prisoner of war does not confer qualify him for the presidency in the way that a season of high-pressure military decision making would. (Coincidentally, Clark commanded just such a high-stakes military mission and, as was unkindly pointed out by a columnist, has been available for the vice presidency for so long that he is approaching his sell-by date. It doesn’t change the fact that his one-liner, in context, had an obvious meaning to anyone with the ability to understand spoken English.)

I have read occasional notes of excitement on other LJ blogs with regard to books that I have not discussed here because (a) I cannot afford to buy them and (b) they deal with fields in which I am worse than an amateur. Since the writers are also not specialists in the areas in question, it gives me the impression that there are, obviously, many more significant conversations going on in venues other than LJ than on it. I use LJ because it is a more convenient go-to location than the scattered online venues available to me otherwise.

But it means that I address a small yet bizarrely diverse readership, such that every time I post something meant specifically for one subgroup I am aware of how fatuous or inexplicable it must seem to another one. I like to think that all of us have gotten the point of how subjectively different the inwardness of different communities are; and that we have learned how to read between the lines of everything, and to read…I like to say “against the grain” because that phrase references both Walter Benjamin and Dwight Macdonald, but I am not sure that that metaphor holds water. (Insert “joke” emoticon; my favorite mixed metaphor, which I have surely cited here before, is “Every time you get your head above water, somebody pulls the rug out from under you.”)

My sense of depression is not merely occasioned by Wesleygate, since pundits are paid to get things as wrong as possible. Rather, I encountered a couple of academic references that reminded me that, despite all the protestations to the contrary, nobody quite gets the idea that each culture, no matter how wrongheaded it seems to us, may have acquired an idea or a technology that is not only well adapted to its own circumstances but applicable to our own situation as well. And of course, each culture, our own included, embodies genuinely dysfunctional notions that ought to be noninjuriously eliminated for the greater good of the species. The problem is that since we can’t see our own faults and project our own onto others, we have no absolute scale for telling what ought to be eliminated, so the best we can do is to be judiciously relativistic.

But all that happens is that we fight over methodological absolutes that are ultimately as unverifiable as the most ill-considered superstition ever invented ad hoc. Nobody wants to get down to cases as to how to preserve that which appears increasingly of value without buying into every bit of the bad stuff as well.

I tend to write about the presumptions and preoccupations of what Ezra Pound called the ’Murkns, but I am aware that the bizarre ways of the Americans and their subculture the Sunbelt Americans are not those of even the entirety of what Winston Churchill called the English-speaking peoples. Not all of whom speak English as their only language on a daily basis.