"Do you believe, as do the many, that certain young men are corrupted by sophists, and that there are certain sophists who in a private capacity corrupt to an extent worth mentioning? Isn't it rather the very men who say this who are the biggest sophists, who educate most perfectly and who turn out young and old, men and women, just the way they want them to be?"
"But when do they do that?" he asked.
"When," I said, "many gathered together sit down in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps, or any other common meeting of a multitude, and, with a great deal of uproar, blame some of the things said or done, and praise others, both in excess, shouting and clapping, and, besides, the rocks and the very place surrounding them echo and redouble the uproar of blame and praise. Now in such circumstances, as the saying goes, what do you suppose is the state of the young man's heart? Or what kind of private education will hold out for him and not be swept away by such blame and praise and go, borne by the flood, wherever it tends so that he'll say the same things are noble and base as they do, practice what they practice, and be such as they are?"
(Republic, 491e - 492b), translated by Allan Bloom
Showing posts with label They Said It Better. Show all posts
Showing posts with label They Said It Better. Show all posts
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Why, You Ask?
Well, my reason for a post entitled "Merry Christmas," and nothing more, is because I'm not going to say "Season's Greetings," "Happy Holidays," or any of the rest of that careful-not-to-offend crap....which, unfortunately, it's all become. True, the generic wishes have been around for a long time, and for most of that time have been innocuous. However, like many other things in our Age of Apology, they're supposed to prevail when communicated to anyone else.
Baloney. It's Christmas......or it's nothing. Certainly nothing I care to be associated with.
Baloney. It's Christmas......or it's nothing. Certainly nothing I care to be associated with.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Election Day '08
Not much to say, since everything that's really important about today lies in a ritual that has been performed one hundred ten times since the inception of the Republic. In thinking about what might be most apt to say about this particular election, a quote comes to mind:
"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
--Spock in 'Amok Time', Star Trek TOS
"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
--Spock in 'Amok Time', Star Trek TOS
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The Ivied Inquisitors Strike Again....
I'm not going to delve into the latest witch-hunting indulged in by our supposedly enlightened universities, Nat Hentoff did it better. Who rides to the rescue (besides Hentoff and a few other organizations who are completely principled in their defense of the First Amendment) will be the most interesting outcome of The Case of the Professor Who Cried Wetback. At this point, I wouldn't take 10-1 odds on the ACLU....
While I'm certain that Nat & I could find a great multitude of things to disagree on, he is that rare individual who is able to separate his politics from his principles.
While I'm certain that Nat & I could find a great multitude of things to disagree on, he is that rare individual who is able to separate his politics from his principles.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
There it is.....
I don't make a practice of posting other people's rants, but I'll make an exception in this case.....and it's a comment to a blog*, of all things! There is so much that's marvelous in this comment about the fragmentation of what we have always taken for granted when we say "education," as well as what passes for culture (we now have to modify it and call it "popular culture"). Then there are the more specific things, such as the withering away of a literate readership with a capacity to sense any subtlety in what is written......just read it.
By Yancy Berns on September 23, 2008 7:34 PM
I'm just afraid that we've transformed this culture, collapsed it down to a xylophone shape, and nobody has the time, the inclination, the temperament, even the desire to see what lives within those folds.
Let's wipe away ALL the invisible quotation marks (god, to be part of the 'irony' generation, and to have no taste for the stuff, such have been my days) and state something obvious: your TV critic did not recognize the line from HAMLET, and it doesn't matter, because 10,000 of his readers won't either, and will think its funny that the critic makes a goofy of those "elitist" words... the fact that it is indeed from the greatest written work of western culture (500 years and still at the top of the pops!) would not sway them if they knew. Because they believe that they are righteous, these Invaders, these "new people" who have no time for details, no interest in ambiguity, and can only afford to take everything at face value as they hurtle down their highways. All things pander to this new uni-mind, and I say again, they brim with what must be righteousness.
I could say this to a 25 year old. I could say, "You know 'Hamlet', that play that they shoved down your throat in 10th grade? It's actually a riveting piece of writing that you will see yourself in, throughout, feel your living in, perhaps more than in any other written thing you would be able to find."
They would say, "How could someone who lived that long ago possibly write something that relates to my life?"
And I could say, "Some things never change."
And they would say, "But i live in the modern era. 2008 isn't about moping and worrying! It's about being positive! One love!"
And I would say, "There can be much positive in a dour work of art. Much you can learn about empathy and soul."
And they would say, "I've got enough drama in my own life. Have you seen those gas prices? I don't need this Hamlet business."
And at that point I would walk away defeated, because I realize this is probably the same person who can't relate to 'Under The Boardwalk' by The Drifters either, because it's 40 years old - and what could someone in the early 60's possibly know about living such a fantastic life in such a fantastic age as we do?
And I might mutter, "Forty years don't mean much in terms of human evolution. Maybe you also won't read a fortune cookie if it comes to the table too long after the check, because what could someone in the back of the restaurant five minutes ago possibly know about you, your life, your troubles, your fabulous friends, in this amazing NOW?"
Now, I might agree about the cookie in general, but if there's one disease that has this culture in its grasp, it's utter, yawning apathy... and not just apathy about the big game or the big election, but about the human condition. This may be a failing of the school system, or just a failing of our attention spans, but nobody took my generation by the hand and led them to Kurosawa or Pete Seeger... and good, because what could Kurosawa or Pete Seeger or Edith Wharton possibly know about what it's like to be a human being in this so fabulous, super-speedy 2008?
We've finally reached the future! "This is our time!", the dispassionate shout, "and we choose not to notice all the interesting ways humans can be different than each other, in conversation, in art, none of that! 'Satire'? Oh, I'm so sick of satire! Every time I don't like a movie and someone tells me I didn't get it because it was satire, I just want to slap him in his smug face!"
And so back to that list of useless dead people, who have no possible idea about the amazing human adventure of 2008,and could offer no possible comfort from beyond the grave. Everything is miniature, and everything is fast, and if death carried you away before this wonderful age of all-inclusive cultural ignorance (why actually learn about it when they can just install Wikipedia into my phone?), they you lose, sucker!
And they fall away: Buster Keaton, S.J. Perelman, Kafka, Christ... what could those knuckle-draggers ever know about faster and faster, smaller and smaller? What, are they gonna help me figure out what do when my friend Tony does that one thing I don't like? Puh-leeeezze!
*For the sake of limiting the size of this post, I'll put in only one other quote from the other blog. For the record, It's Roger Ebert's Journal, entry This is the Dawning of the Age of Credulity. The quote from Hamlet referenced in the entry is cited by Ebert referencing a NYT review by Adam Buckman:
Let me give another example of credulity. The following paragraph appeared this week in a New York Post review by Adam Buckman of the season premiere of "Heroes."
"This show, which was once so thrilling and fun, has become full of itself, its characters spouting crazy nonsense. Here's one I wish someone would translate for me: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends--rough hew them how we will," spouts the enigmatic industrialist Linderman played by Malcolm McDowell, who should win an Emmy for keeping a straight face while reciting these lines."
I am still having a hard time believing that Buckman could not have known that the quote from Hamlet wasn't something he'd read or seen somewhere, and then I alternate with wondering whether or not he was being ironic. And yet, it's easily demonstrated that any sort of classical allusions in literate discourse are pretty much fossilized, receding with the speed of light......so I don't know why Buckman's apparent opacity when it comes to a famous Shakespeare quote should surprise me.
By Yancy Berns on September 23, 2008 7:34 PM
I'm just afraid that we've transformed this culture, collapsed it down to a xylophone shape, and nobody has the time, the inclination, the temperament, even the desire to see what lives within those folds.
Let's wipe away ALL the invisible quotation marks (god, to be part of the 'irony' generation, and to have no taste for the stuff, such have been my days) and state something obvious: your TV critic did not recognize the line from HAMLET, and it doesn't matter, because 10,000 of his readers won't either, and will think its funny that the critic makes a goofy of those "elitist" words... the fact that it is indeed from the greatest written work of western culture (500 years and still at the top of the pops!) would not sway them if they knew. Because they believe that they are righteous, these Invaders, these "new people" who have no time for details, no interest in ambiguity, and can only afford to take everything at face value as they hurtle down their highways. All things pander to this new uni-mind, and I say again, they brim with what must be righteousness.
I could say this to a 25 year old. I could say, "You know 'Hamlet', that play that they shoved down your throat in 10th grade? It's actually a riveting piece of writing that you will see yourself in, throughout, feel your living in, perhaps more than in any other written thing you would be able to find."
They would say, "How could someone who lived that long ago possibly write something that relates to my life?"
And I could say, "Some things never change."
And they would say, "But i live in the modern era. 2008 isn't about moping and worrying! It's about being positive! One love!"
And I would say, "There can be much positive in a dour work of art. Much you can learn about empathy and soul."
And they would say, "I've got enough drama in my own life. Have you seen those gas prices? I don't need this Hamlet business."
And at that point I would walk away defeated, because I realize this is probably the same person who can't relate to 'Under The Boardwalk' by The Drifters either, because it's 40 years old - and what could someone in the early 60's possibly know about living such a fantastic life in such a fantastic age as we do?
And I might mutter, "Forty years don't mean much in terms of human evolution. Maybe you also won't read a fortune cookie if it comes to the table too long after the check, because what could someone in the back of the restaurant five minutes ago possibly know about you, your life, your troubles, your fabulous friends, in this amazing NOW?"
Now, I might agree about the cookie in general, but if there's one disease that has this culture in its grasp, it's utter, yawning apathy... and not just apathy about the big game or the big election, but about the human condition. This may be a failing of the school system, or just a failing of our attention spans, but nobody took my generation by the hand and led them to Kurosawa or Pete Seeger... and good, because what could Kurosawa or Pete Seeger or Edith Wharton possibly know about what it's like to be a human being in this so fabulous, super-speedy 2008?
We've finally reached the future! "This is our time!", the dispassionate shout, "and we choose not to notice all the interesting ways humans can be different than each other, in conversation, in art, none of that! 'Satire'? Oh, I'm so sick of satire! Every time I don't like a movie and someone tells me I didn't get it because it was satire, I just want to slap him in his smug face!"
And so back to that list of useless dead people, who have no possible idea about the amazing human adventure of 2008,and could offer no possible comfort from beyond the grave. Everything is miniature, and everything is fast, and if death carried you away before this wonderful age of all-inclusive cultural ignorance (why actually learn about it when they can just install Wikipedia into my phone?), they you lose, sucker!
And they fall away: Buster Keaton, S.J. Perelman, Kafka, Christ... what could those knuckle-draggers ever know about faster and faster, smaller and smaller? What, are they gonna help me figure out what do when my friend Tony does that one thing I don't like? Puh-leeeezze!
*For the sake of limiting the size of this post, I'll put in only one other quote from the other blog. For the record, It's Roger Ebert's Journal, entry This is the Dawning of the Age of Credulity. The quote from Hamlet referenced in the entry is cited by Ebert referencing a NYT review by Adam Buckman:
Let me give another example of credulity. The following paragraph appeared this week in a New York Post review by Adam Buckman of the season premiere of "Heroes."
"This show, which was once so thrilling and fun, has become full of itself, its characters spouting crazy nonsense. Here's one I wish someone would translate for me: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends--rough hew them how we will," spouts the enigmatic industrialist Linderman played by Malcolm McDowell, who should win an Emmy for keeping a straight face while reciting these lines."
I am still having a hard time believing that Buckman could not have known that the quote from Hamlet wasn't something he'd read or seen somewhere, and then I alternate with wondering whether or not he was being ironic. And yet, it's easily demonstrated that any sort of classical allusions in literate discourse are pretty much fossilized, receding with the speed of light......so I don't know why Buckman's apparent opacity when it comes to a famous Shakespeare quote should surprise me.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Another Great Critic Gone....
We only achieve a comprehensive understanding of ourselves when we share the thoughts of those outsiders who in some fashion transcend our perspective on our national condition. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one such.
Alexis de Tocqueville detailed the endless, incestuous slide of Democracy toward a total preoccupation with egalitarian minutiæ.
.....and here we are.
Alistair Cooke, although he embraced America enough to become a citizen, roundly criticized what he called our "-love of show."
....ditto
Solzhenitsyn is at least as important as the other two, attacking the West's moral decay forty years ago in his 1978 Harvard commencement address:
"It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."
Not to slight the press:
"Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: 'everyone is entitled to know everything.' But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."
It's popular to characterize such critics as just curmudgeons. In Solzhenitsyn's case, nothing could be further from the truth:
"If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward."
You tell 'em.
Alexis de Tocqueville detailed the endless, incestuous slide of Democracy toward a total preoccupation with egalitarian minutiæ.
.....and here we are.
Alistair Cooke, although he embraced America enough to become a citizen, roundly criticized what he called our "-love of show."
....ditto
Solzhenitsyn is at least as important as the other two, attacking the West's moral decay forty years ago in his 1978 Harvard commencement address:
"It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."
Not to slight the press:
"Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: 'everyone is entitled to know everything.' But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."
It's popular to characterize such critics as just curmudgeons. In Solzhenitsyn's case, nothing could be further from the truth:
"If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward."
You tell 'em.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Su Casa es Nuestra Casa
This speaks for itself, not merely about The 545, but, more painfully, about us....as in Walt Kelly's line from Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and they are us."
Monday, April 21, 2008
If you want the short version....
Often it is the view of the acute foreigner that says more about us than we can see or say about ourselves. Thus it was with Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century, and, for my money, Alistair Cooke in the 20th. So far, the best foreign insight on the current election belongs to a Dane, from Thomas Litchford's blog:
“We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.
On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer married to a lawyer, or a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.
On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a very large chest who owns a beer distributorship.
Is there really a contest here?”
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
.....and a big thanks to YOU!
It goes without saying that this blog, and EVERY blog, should have this as its guiding light. Thanks to Big Daddy Drew at Kissing Suzy Kolber, excerpted from "A Hearty Welcome To Our New York Times Readers.":
And now that we have a more upscale readership thanks to you, the Times reader, we’re going to do our damnedest to model this site closely after the Paper of Record. So look out for movie reviews that don’t clearly recommend a film one way or another, conservative op-ed columns that aren’t actually conservative, Nicholas Kristof-style reports from Pakistan that make you feel like shit for a good five minutes, catty TV reviews, Frank Rich-style pieces that marry the latest hot button political issue to the latest pop culture trend in one very clever double entendre (Like, “How Iraq Became A Grind House”! That’s gold!), a printable science section you’ll roll up and use for kindling, the wedding details of wealthy white asshole couples you’d like to beat to death with a shovel, food recipes for things like homemade crème brulee that the author insists “couldn’t be easier to make” but in reality take five goddamn hours just to get in the oven, Al Sharpton quotes, reviews of ballets and operas no one under the age of 72 attends, letters to the editor from righteous dipshits, and a bitching obit section. All that and more!
And now that we have a more upscale readership thanks to you, the Times reader, we’re going to do our damnedest to model this site closely after the Paper of Record. So look out for movie reviews that don’t clearly recommend a film one way or another, conservative op-ed columns that aren’t actually conservative, Nicholas Kristof-style reports from Pakistan that make you feel like shit for a good five minutes, catty TV reviews, Frank Rich-style pieces that marry the latest hot button political issue to the latest pop culture trend in one very clever double entendre (Like, “How Iraq Became A Grind House”! That’s gold!), a printable science section you’ll roll up and use for kindling, the wedding details of wealthy white asshole couples you’d like to beat to death with a shovel, food recipes for things like homemade crème brulee that the author insists “couldn’t be easier to make” but in reality take five goddamn hours just to get in the oven, Al Sharpton quotes, reviews of ballets and operas no one under the age of 72 attends, letters to the editor from righteous dipshits, and a bitching obit section. All that and more!
Monday, May 28, 2007
Memorial Day, 2007
There are many good and thoughtful memorials, designed to help us remember those who have given their all in defense of this country. But on Memorial Day, there is a tendency to focus only on the external threats that the sacrifice of these individuals represent. Accordingly, I felt it appropriate to post something a bit centripetal:
Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track on Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we shall live forever, or die by suicide.
- Abe Lincoln, 1837
Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track on Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we shall live forever, or die by suicide.
- Abe Lincoln, 1837
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