The war of us and them.
And you know, I really ought to be working on the next watchmaker bit. I started revamping that old thing because I’d thought I might have a little time to post this week, but had no idea what I’d say.
Funny how things work out.
Anyway, Josh Lukin writes to let me know that “The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” ain’t necessarily all that, but “...Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red,” now there’s a fuckin’ essay, which reminds me that I still haven’t dug my copy of Times Square Red Times Square Blue to the top of my tottering pile, so I do, and I open it to “Red,” and here, let me write out the first two paragraphs that I saw while we still have some small shreds of Fair Use left:
The primary thesis underlying my several arguments here is that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.
My secondary thesis is, however, that the class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world, though it is at times as hard to detect as Freud’s unconscious or the structure of discourse, perpetually works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and of the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed.
That right there is a model of how things are and what happens to them as we go along. —Here’s another:
An evelm philosopher once wrote: “Almost all human attempts to deal with the concept of death fall into two categories. The first can be described by the injunction: ‘Live life moment by moment as intensely as possible, even to the moment of one’s dying.’ The second can be expressed by the exhortation: ‘Concentrate only on what is truly eternal—time, space, or whatever hypermedium they are inscribed in—and ignore all the illusory trivialities presented by the accident of the senses, unto birth and death itself.’ For women who adhere to either position,” this wise creature noted, “the other is considered the pit of error, the road to injustice, and the locus of sin.”
And one’s from an essay and the other’s from a science fiction novel and it’s not like it’s either the first or the second and there aren’t other ways of looking at things, I mean, for God’s sake, they aren’t even mutually exclusive, and I know you might quibble with this or that aspect of the one or the other, and that what I’m about to do is unfair and even brutally reductionist, but still: take the one, and the the other, and hold ’em up against our current situation, the great divide, the Blue and the Red.
Which does a better job of limning the struggle we’re actually in, and the actual sides that have lined up to join it?
That said, what tactics now suggest themselves? Seem more useful? Counterproductive? Downright destructive?
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Well, hey, Kip, if "Paraliterary" is all that to you and can generate inspiring Manleyesque criticism, knock yourself out with it. My objections are along the lines of a subjective "When it gets away from criticising specific passages in McCloud, it tends both in its assertions and its tone to exemplify those qualities that I have on occasion found rebarbative in Delany's nonfiction" than "It's not worth your while." Damn, now I've probably whetted your appetite for more of my commentary. Just remember whenever I promise you a follow-up on something, I grew up a diminutive ostracized Jew in Northern Ohio and consequently developed quite an identification with Mr. Ellison.
The second position invoked by the wise creature reminds me that Richard Thompson, singing Outside of the Inside in New York City last year, styled it "A song about all religious fundamentalisms --when I described it that way in Nebraska, it didn't go over terribly well." Elsehwere, he introduces it as "A sort of a Taliban's-eye view of the world." Makes me think that the red/blue divide will require us all to be bilingual, like Belgians or something.
I wonder how it would feel to read TSRTSB out of order like that. Ann said that, reading the first essay, she kept thinking, "Why is he telling me all this?" and upon reaching the second, thought, "Oh, so that's why."
The Delany essay, as summarized by your link, calls out the crucial feature of the intellectual-secular-urban culture that's the heart of "Blue" America:
Delany's argument draws a contrast between the randomness of urban contact and the more structured web of connections that goes under the name of networking. He argues that the unplanned, serendipitous encounters of the former are humanly far more productive and valuable than the predictable but severely limited engagements offered by the latter.
The "randomness of urban contact" is practically definitive of what makes a place urban as opposed to either suburban or rural. In all of these places, controlled private environments also occur, but in suburbia, virtually all the functions of public space are shifted to privately-controlled environments, most obviously the shopping mall. And wherever the environment is privately controlled, the private party has an interest in editing out some of the diversity (whether of race, or class, or language, or education) that you'll experience in a genuine urban place.
In short, only urban residents can really see the diversity of their own culture. People who are habituated to urban life are going to be more open, more "liberal" in the classic sense of tolerant of muliple experiences and points of view. This openness lies on a prelinguistic level -- i.e. it's something reinforced by daily experience. And like most prelinguistic attitudes, it both foundational and hard to discuss.
For this reason, I argue here that The Stranger's influential case for urban exceptionalism misidentifies the "Red enemy" as rural America, when the real enemy is a suburban America that is growing new red accretions even as its older fabric shifts in a blue direction.
(And the blue-ing of suburbia can also be connected to the development of more truly public spaces, in imitation of the successful public spaces of great cities. The Project for Public Spaces is a great source on the latter initiative.)
A friend of mine teaches TSRTSB in her college history class, and she's consistently amazed by the fact that the students have no objection to the sex part but are distinctly uncomfortable with the discussion of class and urban interaction.
The other thing that she's run into quite often, which I think is connected, is that her students have very little imaginative ability (or interest) in connecting with or understanding working-class life (much less real poverty). They are bedrock-convinced that every Walmart checker is there purely due to personal decisions/merit/worth, and that such a situation would never happen to *them* (the students) because *they* are in college and on their way to good careers.
And those of us who graduated college in the late 80s to a distinctly underwhelming job market and a passel of student loans just bite our tongues.
Most of these particular students are suburban, and may provide a good barometer of the prevalence of the merit/bootstraps/independence myth that's sucking all compassion out of the country. So then, besides teaching TSRTSB in college and trying to get a little perspective going that way, how do we challenge that?
Personally, my own wee crusade is pointing out examples of the benefit of the public sphere every chance I get, especially in conversation with suburban friends. Not in an annoying way (hopefully) but more modeled on consciousness-raising, which I've found helpful as a model.