For some time now, I’ve been trying to clarify my own politics. I’m
not sure why. It seems, though, that most people I’ve talked
politics with tend to hit a point on the right-to-left spectrum and
not stray too far from it. This might be a function of the kind of
conversations (read: “arguments”) I periodically get roped into,
but it seems like there’s an awful lot of certainty available to
somebody who can consolidate their perspective like that.
So, I’m sitting on a bus, reading Harpers on my way to Kingston,
and reading this piece of intellectual whatnot called “Consuming
Culture” by Lee Siegel, the September issue if you’re looking. We’re
getting towards the anniversary of the destruction of the World
Trade Center, and while everyone seems like their working hard to
get their bit in it’s also apparent that those people whose bit is
to look closely at and comment upon other people’s bits are also
trying to get their bit in.
A tangent, for a moment, and then I’ll come back. I’ve been
introduced in the last few weeks, purely by coincidence, to two
people’s theories on how to get people to buy into just about any
old thing you might want to tell them. How to lie convincingly,
in other words. The first one, from my own father, is pretty
straightforward. His theory is that you can get people to believe the
most outrageous nonsense if you provide some very specific details
about that nonsense in the process. Nobody would accept the bald
statement that you’d run into Fidel Castro the other day in the
mall, but if you said that you’d run into Fidel, and that you were
a little surprised to see he’d trimmed his sideburns and lost a few
pounds, and seemed to be getting around OK, then you’ve garnished
your nonsense in such a way as to make it seem appealing.
Alex Rootham has a slightly subtler approach, a three-step process
that works a lot like sleight-of-hand. His bit goes like this:
you throw the lie right out there, swing it in the breeze, and
then you say something that mitigates it in some way. Then you say
some third thing, and this is key, that people will pretty much
always agree with and that’s got something to do with the mitigating
element. His example was “Men are way better cooks than women,
it’s just that they usually aren’t really trying. Guys are usually
pretty lazy.”
You see that happening? By the end of it you’re looking at the “guys
== lazy” bit and nodding your head or asking yourself when Fidel
Castro started with the sideburns, buying the pretty bow and paying
for the whole parcel. The coin is now in the other hand. There’s not
even enough substance there to call it a false syllogism or some
other logical flaw; it’s a head fake. It can be a subtle thing,
too, but there are some keywords that I’ve discovered that raise
the flag. “After all”, “of course” and “obviously”, among others,
just about anything that asks you to accept what you’re reading as a
truism and move on, a surprising number of which appeared in Seigel’s
mentioned-way-the-hell-back-there article. I spent a lot of time in
there thinking “Red light, back up. What am I agreeing to here?”
Like I say, this is a problem for me. I actually caught myself
thinking something along the lines of “If I figure out how to
properly label my own politics, maybe I can find things that agree
with what I think, and read them.” Boy, what a miserable thing it
is to realize that a thought of that low calibre has just trickled
through your mind. On the other hand, though, it sure would be nice
to be able to find a spot on the spectrum where everything
I come across would either clearly ring good and noble and true,
or be an obviously bald-faced pinko fascist commie plot, assuming I
don’t turn out to be a pinko fascist commie conspirator myself. It
would sure introduce some clarity to my otherwise muddy life.
Nevertheless, I find myself pulled to both the right and left
sides of the spectrum with seemingly equal tensions lately. I
like to look for well-expressed ideas and good writing, something
that’s goddamned hard to find in Popular Science or indeed Popular
Anything these days. My local newspapers are the Citizen and
the Sun (two gripes for another time) so you can see why I’d be
a thirsty man on that front. The difficulty is that whenever I’m
reading Harper’s lately, I find myself in three superposed states:
I feel interested or swayed by some of the ideas that I run into,
I am just appalled by the self-satisfied smugness of the entire
thing, and I find myself having to read some of those sentences
over and over again, while they continue to not make any sense.
I discussed this with Pierre, Antoine’s father, and one of the
things he mentioned is that this could just be a consequence of
Harper’s target audience – leftist intellectuals, or at least
wannabe-intellectuals, do not want to be addressed in the language
of a left-wing high-school student, or a right-wing anything. It
seems, though, that often this language is used for its own sake,
not because it’s the best way to communicate an idea but because it
assures the reader that the author is “one of us”. And the downside
to that, if you lose track of why you’re using the words you’re
using, is that you end up participating in one of these methods
that I’ve described above.
I might well be wrong about this. All of it, really, but I don’t
think so. My impression might change on a more careful reading,
but the general structure of the article does seem to follow Alex’s
technique, and a number of the eddies in the flow of the text seem
to be of the same pattern as the above-mentioned HOWTOs. By the
end of it, Seigel has certainly said a few pithy things, and even
a few things that I agree with. His comparison of styles and the
motivation behind them is interesting, at least in the first case,
but his writing is so technical and occasionally obtuse that
it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he’s picked these two
polar opposite data points out of the blue and made a sweeping
generalization about them that’s almost completely orthogonal to
the claims made in the first quarter of the text.
And it’s disenchanting as hell, on a couple of levels. First
off, I consider myself a pretty well-read, literate kind of guy,
but when somebody drops a bomb like
“Criticism that
doesn’t get beyond the media’s representation of experience ends up
failing conciousness because it obscures politics, and experience
generally.”
in the middle of an article, immediately
after pulling Alex’s stunt with the line
“The
media only become dangerous, after all, when politics grow
poisonous.”
I’m left to wonder if I’m a complete
illiterate and the definition of a number of words has changed
recently, or whether dude here has just decided that it’s time to
whip out his critical-analysis johnson and get the ruler. Either
I’m an idiot or he’s a wanker; I’m not terribly enthusiastic about
either option. I’m suddenly committed to read to the end to find
out, though, which doesn’t thrill me either because at this point
I can see The Alex Technique in its early stages.
Go read the article, if you like, and mail me if you’ve got some
insight. My conclusion was that he had a couple of interesting points
and a couple of good lines, but that they belonged in about three
separate essays with friends, not shoehorned into that thing. He’s
found one person he worships, and successfully compares him to
two people who he obviously believes to suck, and he does it well. But
seriously, read the last paragraph or two of that article and tell
me if it’s got anything at all to do with the first bit.
Oh, well. My politics aren’t cleared up much, but maybe my critical
faculties are a bit further along.
