Being a gay Eagle Scout produces a strange kind of consciousness, a double-vision of objects and traditions and words that other people experience as blissfully uncomplicated. Take a tent, for instance. In Boy Scouts, you learn how to pitch one if you have it or construct one out of found materials if you do not. It is a useful thing; it means shelter. But in the larger debate over gays in scouting, a tent is a thing dewy with erotic charge. Gay non-scouts joke with you about furtive assignations on hot summer nights, while bigots luxuriate in the same fantasies, only in the more strident key of gay panic. Perhaps the gays and the bigots are right to fetishize tents; no doubt they’ve played host to teenage experimentation many times over the past 100 years or so of scouting. But for myself, I cannot speak to the reality of such intrigues—my fondest memories of tents involve helping my dad to spread a crinkled blue tarp under one. Or better yet, the smell of dampened smoke as it drifts through the mesh screen on a chilly spring morning. Those memories, in the end, are what scouting means to me—and they have nothing to do with sexuality, in the abstract or in practice.While it's okay to sentimentalise the Boy Scouts, an organisation that claims the moral authority to exclude a portion of the public because of their (perfectly acceptable) inborn nature is not — I repeat, not — charming. And even though an end to the ban is being seriously considered, the rationale is largely financial: they're losing sponsorship over this. The Boy Scouts of America cannot maintain such high levels of financial support from big corporations while also endorsing retrograde attitudes towards gays. The sponsors won't wear it. Bigotry, it turns out, simply isn't profitable.
"I'm Gay and I Loved Being a Boy Scout"
J. Bryan Lowder tries to disentangle the Boy Scouts from any notion of sexual orientation:
On the Small Screen
Peter Aspden tried downloading a movie onto his iPhone. He wasn't impressed:
It is one of the most famous one-liners in the history of cinema, which also turned out to be an inadvertent prophecy. “I am big,” says the slighted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). “It’s the pictures that got small.”
She had no idea. The past half-century has seen the pictures get smaller and smaller, to the point that we wonder if they can ever be big again. From television screen, to laptop, to smartphone, the ever-shrinking movies reach a greater part of the world than ever before. But what have we lost along the way? On a recent flight, I downloaded the relatively well-received Marvel spin-off The Avengers to watch on my iPhone. It was, of course, a ridiculous venture, this squeezing of monumental themes on to a miniaturist canvas, lacking in textural detail, atmosphere, communality of experience. But it was easily accessible, convenient and cheap. Is the trade-off worth it? And how does it affect us and the art form?
"Interesting"
Rebecca Ariel Porte reviews Our Aesthetic Categories:
“Interesting” is an aesthetic judgment so mild and so commonplace that it barely seems to qualify as a judgment at all. But that’s part of Ngai’s point. If interesting is, on some level, an aesthetic judgment, then its ubiquity (especially in critical contexts) stresses the “ambiguous status of aesthetic judgments in criticism,” as they “mediat[e] feelings and concepts.” “Interesting” is our gambit, Ngai contends, when we feel something but we’re not yet sure what to think. When we say something is interesting, we are inviting conversation. We want to be asked to explain ourselves.
Apologies, Etc.
I'm taking a break from blogging until next weekend, as I'm sitting exams next week. It's not ideal to be absent during this important moment of the election season, so I just hope that in the next week or so I don't miss anything too important. See you next week.
The Week in Review
Tuesday on the Report, we explored the question of whether or not the debates actually matter. I agreed that they mean more for Romney. I applauded California's ban on gay conversion therapy for teenagers, and we found a way to make New York women nod in unison. Kingsley Amis's legacy is all too often dominated by talk of his various eccentricities, and even being indie rock royalty doesn't pay that well. Smoking segregation is an ongoing battle and there are more invisible things than you think. The critics of reason return; so do the critics of American air travel. Soldiers in modern warfare need less muscle and more brains, so why do we continue to recruit eighteen year-old males? The recruiters have it all wrong.
On Wednesday, we found that ditching helmet rules encourages people to cycle, especially in cities like London, where the city sponsors "Boris" bikes for public use, and that the housewives of Japan are giving their husbands less pocket money. Pastors all across America protested an amendment that some on the Right have called a "muzzle on religion" by giving explicitly partisan sermons, a liberal found an unlikely pen pal in a conservative blogger named Esther, and a presidential candidate failed to start a chant. The unbearable debate about grammar rules continued, and we agreed that maybe we should give up on the rules about "whom" and "who." We looked at the Kael answer to the question of why we enjoy movies, and whether or not it matters that we enjoy them.
David Rothkopf called the election for Obama, perhaps prematurely, whose daughter is expected to show good judgement in music and like Motown. No, correlation may not imply causation, but this is no way to deflect a possibly legitimate point. We continued to ask why Americans believed in Muslim Rage, and concluded that the issue was neither political nor religious. Speaking of beliefs, how malleable are your political ones? It turns out that website pagination is evil, and male decline may not be strictly true. Counter to the prevailing logic, it just might be that the best way to help Iran in their efforts to build a nuclear bomb would be to bomb them. The specifics surrounding Paul Ryan's tax plan remain opaque, as does the reasoning behind bans on books like Alice Walker's The Colour Purple (did you know there was such a thing as Banned Books Week?). Finally, let's remind ourselves that this is not the most important election we've ever seen.
Thursday was the day of the first debate. Liveblog here. Reaction round-ups here and here. The verdict? "There was a singular commanding force on stage tonight (or this afternoon, if you're here) and it was Mitt Romney. Obama was tired, lethargic, and even appeared indifferent to the proceedings. And where Romney engaged in the fight, Obama merely endured it." Also that day, are presidential debates too civil, and has another ritual, the TED Talk, lost its spark? The mind of the libertarian is a cold and unfeeling place. Book blogs, however, are brilliant.
The Worst President Ever
The historian H.W. Brands takes a sympathetic view of Ulysses S. Grant, typically the leading contender for the title:
Ruth Graham is less kind:The standard rap on Grant is that he was a drunk who surrounded himself with spoilsmen who stole the country blind. In an era of scandals—the Crédit Mobilier’s siphoning of millions in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Tweed Ring’s bilking of New York in awarding city contracts, the Whiskey Ring’s dodging of the tax on booze—Grant was said to turn a blind (or drunken) eye to all manner of wrongdoing. Beyond that, the simple soldier was over his head in the White House. At a time of rapid economic change, he hadn’t a clue how to manage an increasingly sophisticated economy.
Considering the current state of the American economy, this last charge might now be the most damning, if true. But it’s not true. And Grant’s surprisingly sophisticated handling of economics, especially in the wake of the Panic of 1873, suggests that he deserves better from the historians than he has been getting.
When the Panic of 1873 hit -- one major Philadelphia financial firm crumbled, pulling down other top firms and dozens of banks, and prompting mass layoffs by factories and railroads -- there was no reason to think that President Grant, a Civil War hero and a failed businessman, would be equipped to handle the first country’s first national depression. Brands admits it’s hard to know how much Grant’s decisions had to do with the country’s eventual recovery, but in his agonized decision to veto a bill that would have pumped quick cash into the economy to boost inflation, he sees evidence of “a more subtle thinker than he was deemed by contemporaries and most historians since.”
Romney's Sick Joke
Paul Krugman is pissed about dishonest claims by Mitt Romney about what is and isn't covered under his healthcare plan:
What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.
American Democracy for Sale
Lewis Lapham, learned and eloquent as always, takes on everything that's wrong with American democracy and America itself ("a republic," as Benjamin Franklin said, "if you can keep it"). Money quote:
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold each other responsible for stirring up class warfare between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent; each of them can be counted upon to mourn the passing of America's once-upon-a-time egalitarian state of grace. They deliver the message to fund-raising dinners that charge up to $40,000 for the poached salmon, but the only thing worth noting in the ballroom or the hospitality tent is the absence among the invited bank accounts (prospective donor, showcase celebrity, attending journalist) of anybody intimately acquainted with - seriously angry about, other than rhetorically interested in - the fact of being poor.For obvious reasons, Sheldon Adelson comes to mind a lot while reading such essays.
Tragedy's Decline and Fall
In tragic Greek theatre, the thing every protagonist has in common is social status. Since the genre depends on the notion of a fall, it's typically better that this fall occurs from a great height. It was one of the requirements Aristotle specified for tragic drama, "that its suffering subject be a person of worldly importance." Like many, Jenny Diski sees a connection between tragic drama and postmodern celebrity:
Maybe with gossip we have settled for Schadenfreude in place of catharsis: thank heavens the pointlessly fortunate Kim [Kardashian] has cellulite, and that we can watch her more-than-human status crumble on her thighs. Yet, on the other hand, there is a case to be made for such domestically scaled disasters – as being a commonplace version of tragedy writ small, and more suitable for the home-based intimacy of television, newspapers, magazines and internet-linked iPads on the breakfast table, rather than the grander scale of the Theatre of Dionysus. The loss of youth and beauty, from whichever social stratum you view it, is a universal experience, pointing to entropy and our common end. Just being young and becoming old was not tragic enough in itself for the Greeks, but death was, and in observing the decaying body that is what we must at some level become aware of. In present, less reverential times, when we can look at the great and the good and imagine ourselves more directly, perhaps we understand better the power and implications of apparently smaller sadnesses more generally suffered.
The Blog as Gravestone
Consider it:
Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.