Dennis Dale writes
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The appeal of Barack Obama is best understood as kitsch.
The Obama campaign--as any, only more so--is more a work of art than of argument. As such it is (present tense, for it continues) a narrative blend of hagiography, propaganda and mythological fiction. Like any work of art it may blend various genres and themes, but it is ultimately of one specific type. All political movements rely more or less on kitsch, but the Obama campaign, stripped to its essence, is primarily kitsch.
This phenomenon-as-political movement is a masterwork of improvisational, interactive environmental theatre, with the electorate as its participatory audience. But a political campaign is no mere work of fancy or fabrication. When power is the end for which the narrative is the means, one cannot refuse his role in the play, even in opposition. We are all players in this melodrama. All the world is a stage, indeed.
What do I mean herein by “kitsch”? Not merely that it is sentimental, though sentiment is its base material, and would hardly differentiate it from any other political campaign or movement. I refer to the self conscious aspect of kitsch, as the celebration of a given sentiment as its own justification, a transcendent thing in itself. Kitsch is not the artist saying "behold this truth", but the audience saying "behold our love of truth." This is its appeal, directly to our vanity.
What makes kitsch bad art, its unearned catharsis, makes it the most effective demagogy. It requires nothing of us other than acquiescence to the sentiment. Kitsch is the saccharine film soundtrack that drops in before anything has actually happened, cuing us to emote inwardly. A neatly closed emotional system, impervious to doubt, skepticism and irony.
Those few of us left capable of viewing the Obama phenomenon with detachment will recognize these aspects in it--particularly its offer of an easy, celebratory catharsis. In the adoring crowds, in the deliberately incurious and uncritical appreciation of the candidate and now president-elect that continues. In the candidate's unspoken collusion with the media to equate his personal ambition with the civil rights movement itself.
Barack Obama effortlessly assumes the mantle of grievance for the greatest sins of the nation--slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement--not with a greater understanding of this history, as is habitually and thoughtlessly assumed, but with an inferior understanding of it; for Barack Obama, having neither the black American nor white American experience, American race relations is a cherished romance that became one with his considerable ambition. This romance will not be sacrificed now.
For a candidate to arrive on the scene as a sort of prefabricated historical figure, for his ascension to be defined as an act of justice and absolution; in light of the grand myth of the civil rights movement in America and the sheer power of this narrative--the wonder of Barack Obama is not that he is here, but that it has taken this long for him to arrive....
Read the whole thing.
Posts
29 comments:
Dennis Dale's writing is flowery and unreadable. I can't bear it.
I also can't read the War Nerd, or that Meniuc Moldbug fellow.
Could be because of my upbringing, but to me "kitsch" has always carried a conotation of poor taste, as well as excessive sentimentality, with a dose of "we don't do that in our house. That's what those poor lower middle class people who just don't know any better do" thrown in.
Not that this is a SWPL thing either, because whiter people in many cases wouldn't know good taste if it bit them in the ass. "Kitsch" is kind of like obscenity: I can't necessarily tell you exactly what it is, but I know it when I see it.
Just like the title of Thomas Sowell's book has it -- "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy".
Dennis Dale's article seems to describe the Ronald Reagan mythology perfectly.
It's struck me that the liberal media made a pretty good job of denigrating GWB on the basis of his assumed Texanry. They seem to have made less of a meal out of Barry's assumed blackness. On closer scrutiny, it really is a complete joke.
I too look at Obama as sort of a black Reagan. Reagan always had the "Reagan boosters" that idolized him and were conveinently blind whenever he did something stupid or illegal. Reagan's popularity was never as high as his supporters claimed. He made a lot of tough choices and a lot of people hated him too which is rarely mentioned. In the end his supporters named an aircraft carrier after him before he died which was a little cheeky.
I agree with the first anon: Dennis Dale's writing is practically unreadable. He writes almost exclusively in passive voice and tries too hard to sound poetic.
Kitsch: "the celebration of a given sentiment as its own justification." Doesn't that describe good music as well?
Intellectuals may prefer argument and reason -- or epistemology, if you like -- but human beings prefer something more semantic: a narrative with meaning and purpose.
That is what the Hebraic vision of God and History is all about. Call me kitsch, but I have great hopes for Obama.
Dennis Dale's article seems to describe the Ronald Reagan mythology perfectly.
Speaking as a foreigner here, Reagan was far more subtle and understated, Obama's phoney routine sticks in my throat. Just my take.
This is a very good essay on the relation between SWPL and the Messiah. But the essay focuses on White America and its myths. Whites still corner the dominant narratives that drive our culture, but these myths are losing ground by the day as the demography of America rapidly shifts under an immigration onslaught of number and proportion never seen before. I believe that multicultural America is now not only real, but beyond repair. There will be no melting pot to recycle and reinvent our civic mettle.
The American narrative for Latinos and Blacks is completely different than the narratives of those descended from Europeans. Progressives would agree but would cite a cultural transmission of myth developed from exclusion by a racist White society. As the essay makes clear, all societies are as racist as you want to see them, so the idea of a cultural driver is weak. I would posit that genetics acts on behavior, which in turn informs culture. It is this collision of cultures, of expressed genetics, that will create a rupture to tear from the periphery of multiculturalism and into the fabric of national consciousness.
To non-White America, Obama does not represent redemption so much as the promise of revolution. The Utopian end game is the same as all revolutionary end games: to attain and then hold absolute power. Power in this case over the White population whom in non-White mythology has been the primary root cause of the seemingly endless pathologies of color. Reinforcement comes from the non-stop repetition of this nonsense by the media and education complex. This in turn has created its own set of historical "facts." Genetics plays no role in this mythos of victim and victimizer except to act as a signifier for the ugly realities of the eugenics movement. Many of the White outliers in the PC universe hold a similar self-loathing view, some even see themselves as nonwhite, yet the majority of liberal Whites do not incorporate this nihilism into their sense of self. They don't have the time or the inclination to think about such things nor the desire to end their comfortable lifestyles as an act of atonement. They simply want to offer kitsch contrition to the shared sentimentality of kitsch inherited guilt, and then move on. Everyone holding hands in the bright warm sun.
Obama is the product of a zeitgeist, birthed on the greatest lie of our age, maybe of all time: that all of us are the same under our different skin colors. We are not. We are creatures of our genomes. And when that singular revealed truth is incorporated into the national psyche, the politics of sentimentality will not hold. What will take its place is up for grabs, a vacuum waiting to be filled with a new set of social and political relations that will have to account for an expanded, causal understanding of DNA. Obama is the first demagogue of this new age, the thesis to the coming anti-thesis that will create a new history. The question is will the center hold. I can’t think of a way that it can.
Steve get over it. Obama's just a liberal guy. It might have been Edwards, or Hillary. Can you imagine what kind of country we'd be if we didn't punish the Republicans by voting them out by a clear, if not overwhelming, margin?
"Dennis Dale's article seems to describe the Ronald Reagan mythology perfectly."
Spot on. All successful politician at the presidential level are kitschy by Dale's definition. Which isn't surprising considering most pop culture is as well. Kitsch sells.
Anonymous wrote: "Dennis Dale's writing is flowery and unreadable. I can't bear it. I also can't read the War Nerd, or that Mencius Moldbug fellow."
I have the same reaction. Dale has some good ideas, but he overwrites them. Also, he spends a lot of time on his blog complaining that he doesn't have enough readers, which inclines me to be one of the people who doesn't read him.
War Nerd I enjoy, but the personality that comes through his writing puts me off. I feel the same way about Fred Reed. I have to psyche myself up to read him as he always puts me in a negative frame of mind.
Sailer I enjoy, also Lawrence Auster and Mickey Kaus. That's really about it. Who has the time?
"Dennis Dale's writing is flowery and unreadable."
Beyond a certain point, there's no use debating matters of taste, but I would disagree. Diametrically.
Particularly when writing about the intersection of politics, culture, and the national psyche, Dennis is outstanding.
It may take a little more time and concentration to read one of Dale's articles than it does yer average blog, but it is invariably well worth the effort.
I like what you write, Kevin b.
airtommy: very apt observation about Reagan. To quote George Harrison: it's easier to see a book on a shelf than to see yourself. (At least in a "dispassionate" fashion.)
To those who feel negatively about Dale, War Nerd, Reed, etc.: the reason you can't stand them is "kitsch" at work, IMO. You guys love to deride liberal whites for the SWPL stuff, but you can't bear it when someone like Reed does the same with self-described conservatives.
No one likes to see oneself as stripped of all kitsch attributions -- which is "all too human" as Nietzsche would put it.
I'm waiting for you guys to start a Stuff Conservative White People Like blog -- you know, just for the sake of honesty and balance. For the material, just analyze Tom Piatak's write-ups topically, and you'll have something like 100 items up front.
JD
I used to read Dennis Dale regularly. And thought he had great talent - especially in the autobiographical pieces. But his recent writing is too dense and overwritten.
I heard a black Republican on NPR the other day gush repeatedly that Barack Obama (whom this gentleman voted for, party be damned) is going to "fix this economy!" "There will be a lot less racism when Obama fixes our economy!"
He's just gonna get in there and fix it. Like the best damn car mechnanic you ever saw, popping the hood and changing the gaskets.
But if the impossible happens and Black Jesus doesn't solve all our problem, then we will know who to blame...Whitey. Racism. Wreckers.
The American electorate. Idiocracy before its time.
Is David Axelrod the the king of kitsch?
Talking about the Obama campaign talk about "Axe" not the product he sells "In 1985, Axelrod formed a political consultancy company, Axelrod & Associates.. In 1987, he worked on the successful reelection campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor. This established his first experience in working with black politicians and he later became a key player in similar mayoral campaigns of blacks, including Dennis Archer in Detroit, Michael R. White in Cleveland, Anthony A. Williams in Washington, D.C., Lee P. Brown in Houston, and John F. Street in Philadelphia.[2]"
"kitch sells"
In the end his supporters named an aircraft carrier after him before he died which was a little cheeky.
George H.W. Bush (still living, last I checked) has one, too. And Jimmy Carter has a submarine (since he served on a sub). Clinton has the VD ward on a hospital ship named for him.
This trend towards naming so many things after still living (and still serving) politicians is quite disgusting. Even naming things after the dead ones sort of chafes when you consider family political dyansties (our state courthouse is named after a former governer, whose son is my congressman, whom my newspaper treats like God; our federal building is named after a former senator, whose son...etc).
Barack Obama effortlessly assumes the mantle of grievance for the greatest sins of the nation--slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement...
What Obama will prove is that no matter what we do, there is, in black eyes, no way to atone for all of the real and alleged sins of white America (see: South Africa). Our burden is one we will carry through eternity. 600,000 dead Americans is not enough. Hundreds of billions in various forms of transfer payments is not enough. Electing a black president is not enough. The only hurt his election will heal is the guilt in the heart of so many white Americans who will soon realize that they are not to blame. Coming when it did, against so odious a GOP opponent, I find Obama's election a very cheap price to pay.
JD:
I'm waiting for you guys to start a Stuff Conservative White People Like blog -- you know, just for the sake of honesty and balance.
Hey man, nothing's stopping you. Do it well, and you might rake in a few hundred grand yourself. I doubt it though; there's just too much competition. Satire of the conservative suburban bourgeois types is a pretty well-tilled field. Ever see King of the Hill? That could be SCWPL, the show. How about, oh, American Beauty, The Stepford Wives, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Pleasantville, But I'm a Cheerleader, The Ice Storm, anything by Michael Moore, or any of a thousand other works?
Really, if you want satire of conservative white Americans, you don't have to look very far.
If anything became clear in this election it is that the MSM is much more powerful than what the alternate media would like to admit. The MSM systematically savaged Bush in order to prepare the groundwork for an Obama presidency. Doing all that carpet bombing of Bush was necessary because even the MSM knew that most of the US was not convinced a black prez. would be fundamentally better than an avg. GOP guy.
The MSM systematically savaged Bush in order to prepare the groundwork for an Obama presidency. Doing all that carpet bombing of Bush was necessary because even the MSM knew that most of the US was not convinced a black prez.
Indeed, in the public perception Democrats hadn't been in control of Congress for the last two years, immigration was not a leading cause of wage stagnation and uninsured workers, and Democrats in the Senate hadn't scuttled efforts to reform Fannie and Freddie. Those facts got no coverage whatsoever. Mark Foley sent racy emails to young House page boys and that got major coverage in 2006, but no one in the country in 2008 heard of John Murtha, William Jefferson and Alcee Hastings.
About a week before the election the Obama campaign credit card fraud story broke. At about the same time the story of the McCain fundraising letter sent to the Russian UN ambassador also broke.
The McCain letter story was covered by the Washington Post, AP, Reuters and the BBC. The Obama credit card fraud story got no coverage in newspapers at all.
Lawful Neutral:
What exactly are you talking about?
Your rhetoricism displays the "we've had enough of being derided, so screw you" attitude. Which is what I was trying to address.
The things you mention are what *liberals* think of conservatives.
SWPL's Christian Lander is an (ex-?)liberal that does self-satire. I was asking for a similar honest self-criticism from someone conservative.
A more accurate comparison: most of what so-called conservatives write about the world is as accurate anthropologically and sociologically as the liberal stuff you've listed is about ordinary Americans.
(Side note: I still don't think even ordinary "liberal white Americans" are as idiotic as the kind Christian Lander satirizes in his observations. Ordinary people have real lives to attend to instead of obsessing with the vacuous status symbols that artsy-fartsy liberal arts college or English department types wallow intellectually in.)
A minor example: every time I see here a comment by a reader that does not say entirely negative things about Arabs, at least a few dimwits will drop the "Isreal has every right to defend itself, we must make life very hard for Arabs... yada yada" line just to appear conservative and/or nationalistic enough. Don't you think this kinda thing displays the blind faith in certain values as "self-conglatulary status symbols" among conservatives -- the way SWPL items do among liberals? Or, just check out the comments some readers are dropping under Kathleen Parker's columns on Townhall lately. If you disagree, ask Steve to delete my comment.
The sign of a second rate mind is the inability to apply a generalization consistently -- in our case, sociologically. This is generally what lies at the root of "kitsch:" basing your perspective on a tunnel-vision partial truth, and celebrating yourself for it.
(But then, everyone hates sociology. A commentor recently kept repeating here that it's just "common sense." Which means what, exactly? That Newton came up with his discoveries in physics using "uncommon sense?")
--
As Steve wrote in his latest VDARE column, what people need is neither pessimism nor optimism -- I'd add, definitely not what I called "opportunistic triumphalism." What they need is sober realism.
Human social problems are not solved by sweeping statements based on 2.5 data points that make us feel superior for being part of this or that group. They are solved by REALISM.
JD
P.S. You want conservative "kitsch," just go to the nearest church or mosque or synagogue and see how people admire themselves for being the faithful of this or that religion. Or read what Brenda Walker wrote about what a bunch of Muzzies did for Obama (slaughtering 44 sheep as sacrifice), and these are very conservative peasants. Don't forget to concentrate on Walker's snarky characterization of it: "In Muslim society, there's nothing like mass killing to say Celebration!" I'm waiting for her to mention the statistics of the massive cow, chicken, and pork consumption at the dinners that celebrated Obama's victory in the US -- although I don't expect it. And then go listen to this War Nerd interview for a bit of realism.
You'd think "kitsch" as Dale writes about it is a modern French literary movement that only liberals adopted or something. Kitsch is practically 90% of culture everywhere. The default emotional mode of a predator glorified monkey that wallows in the brain chemistry created by its shelfish genes.
JD: Kitsch is practically 90% of culture everywhere. The default emotional mode of a predator glorified monkey that wallows in the brain chemistry created by its selfish genes.
I'll drink to that. Ever see what the Classical sculptures and monuments of antiquity supposedly looked like before their paint wore away? Yikes! I'll also agree there's no lack whatsoever of conservative kitsch; in fact, it's probably the most common form of kitsch I see.
You'd think "kitsch" as Dale writes about it is a modern French literary movement that only liberals adopted or something.
If that's your only reference for the word kitsch, you're right.
I was asking for a similar honest self-criticism from someone conservative.
Check out King of the Hill. It is exactly what you are asking for. The show pokes fun at conservative middle America, and doesn't hesitate to mock its foibles, but its heart is definitely on Hank Hill's side.
I still don't think even ordinary "liberal white Americans" are as idiotic as the kind Christian Lander satirizes in his observations. Ordinary people have real lives to attend to instead of obsessing with the vacuous status symbols that artsy-fartsy liberal arts college or English department types wallow intellectually in.
Of course it's exaggeration, but there's a kernel of truth there. That's what makes it funny.
What exactly are you talking about?
Your rhetoricism displays the "we've had enough of being derided, so screw you" attitude. Which is what I was trying to address.
I'm just saying, it seems to me that we're marinating in satire of conservative white American kitsch. Some of it is good stuff, some isn't, but it's everywhere I look. Obviously there's plenty of mockery of liberal kitsch as well, but from where I sit it's not ubiquitous like mockery of conservatives is.
There is no shortage of idiocy nor bad taste on any part of the political spectrum. Any human being who can look at this, for example, without rolling his eyes loses some points in my estimation. Anyone who honestly thinks his own faction is made up of the wise and the good and his opposition of the foolish and the evil, is probably not worth talking to. This does not mean that it's wrong to laugh at a well-done satire of the opposition, nor does doing so create an obligation to write an equally funny lampoon of the nonsense and foolishness in your own ranks. Sure, some people will mistake the caricatures for an accurate picture of the real world, but for god's sake, why would you try to engage them in a serious conversation?
Post a Comment