The End of Generation X
Friday, August 29, 2008
The big end-of-summer post here at millinerd has to start with a question: Is it time to stop discussing the absurdly popular blog
Stuff White People Like? Not just yet.
The book perfects and expands Christian Lander's satirical achievement considerably, justifying a closer look and providing an Indian Summer to Lander's success. The book's subtitle, "The definitive guide to the unique taste of millions," explains its power: Lander exposes how what many think is their unique, ineffable taste in artisan breads, Wes Anderson movies and Arcade Fire is not only instantly identifiable, but has the mass appeal of Nascar.
Stuff White People Like, as
Bobos in Paradise before it, has defined not a race but a demographic; and by defining it, has exposed one massive pretension: We white people thought we had escaped demographics.
As most know, the book reads like an anthropological field guide that would enable an outsider to befriend and win favors from "white people," that is, 20-30 something upper middle-class left-leaning North Americans probably educated at small liberal arts colleges. Because, according to Lander, "white people need authenticity like they need oxygen," it can be difficult to watch one's carefully cultivated identity exposed in these pages as utterly commonplace (consider, for example, the quote on the upper right sidebar on this blog).
As the white tide of satire encroaches upon one's lifestyle choices, the reader keeps retreating, seeking higher ground to secure some kind of uniqueness. But, as so many have learned, there's no escape. The fact that someone can so easily identify our "uniqueness" exposes our sameness. It can sting a bit, but overall, it's funny. Lander's severest critique, however, is reserved for liberal pieties; and in puncturing them,
Stuff White People Like operates like a conservative Trojan horse.
Consider #18, simply entitled
Awareness. White people "firmly believe all the world's problems can be solved through 'awareness' - meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, magically causing someone else, like the government, to fix it." #62 is
Knowing What's Best for Poor People. White people believe that "if given money and education, all poor people would be exactly like them." When talking to a white person, "It is essential that you make it clear that poor people do not make decisions based on free will." New in the book is #112,
Free Health Care: White people love it, "at least until they have to wait in line for an MRI. This is very similar to the way that white people express their support for public school when they don't have children." #57 concerns
Michael Moore, "the film-maker who has produced a body of work responsible for reaffirming things that white people already believe in... Perhaps you noticed the increase in health-care policy scholars in 2007, or American foreign-policy experts in 2004, or gun-control pundits in 2002." #98 is
Noam Chomsky: "If it were possible to dole out white sainthood..." Could the
Russell Kirk Reader do it better?
Lander is emboldened to takes steps in the book that he didn't venture on the blog. Consider #118 on the
ACLU:
Perhaps one of the most universal things on this list is white people's love of the ACLU and its actions. And why not? It incorporates so many things white people love: lawyers, religions their parents don't belong to, knowing what's best for poor people, non-profit organizations, and expensive sandwiches. (The last point is not confirmed, but it's a pretty safe bet to say that there is nothing ACLU lawyers like more than removing the Ten Commandments from public places and then digging into a nice panino).
The book ridicules fear of the big business boogeyman. White people
hate corporations (#82), granted these are not Apple, Target, IKEA or Whole Foods, all companies which make stuff they like. Anti-corporate books like No Logo are poked fun at for their belief that we live in a "Matrix-style manufactured universe," to which a subscription to Adbusters is the liberating red pill.
Why not a few more? "Though he would likely hate them all, white people cannot get enough of
Che Guevara" (#113). "If you ever mention Fox News you will have lost respect and credibility to such a high degree that you might have to move" (#115). "
Public Radio provides white people with news and information that has the proper perspective (their own)" (#44). A white person becoming a professor involves "moving to a small town, and telling the local residents how they are awful and uncultured" (#81). And here is the shortest entry in its entirety: "White people like
Barack Obama because they are afraid that if they don't they will be considered racist" (#8). One can see how for some, polite I-can-laugh-at-myself chuckles might, at this point, be running thin.
A few items on Lander's list take us into more serious territory. A corollary of white people
hating their parents (#17) is their love for
religions their parents don't belong to, for white people "will believe in any religion that doesn't involve Jesus" (#2). Furthermore, "Whole Foods stores have replaced churches and cathedrals as the most important and relevant buildings in [white] society" (#48). Finally, some who purchased the book for comic relief may not find much of it in #96:
If you encounter a white person who is trying to produce a child in their late thirties and is having some difficulty, it is very important that you never mention that it might be due to their trying to have children so late in life.
Like a good band that gets too popular, Christian Lander's success makes it easy to underestimate the importance of his accomplishment. Not only has Lander written some clever satire, but he's given a potent explanation as to why so many of us - despite it being exceedingly unfashionable - become more conservative. (He also inadvertently provides the definitive guide to the Emergent Church.) Beyond that, Lander so effectively demolishes our attempts at uniqueness that his book could legitimately be called the end of Generation X. In other words, we've all been found out.
It does not take a lot of imagination to conceive what an answer to Lander's satire might look like. There is, therefore, an escape. To find the high ground, select key items from his list and imagine the reverse. Understand that business, even big business, can be but is not necessarily bad. Have children, stay married, learn more about economics, be more sincere than ironic. Despise not the specter of Lander's book - "the wrong kind of white person" - i.e. the ones at Sam's Club. Know that it's as pathologically weird to hate one's country as it is to hate one's parents. Above all, take traditional faith seriously. White people, as defined by Christian Lander, don't like any of
that stuff, and there's the (sort of) good news:
Stuff White People Like makes being a conservative religious believer in the 21st century genuinely unique.
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Seminarian Painters
Thursday, August 28, 2008
In his superb textbook on
American Art & Architecture, Michael J. Lewis explains that the new interest in the body in American art
should not be mistaken for Renaissance humanism, which viewed the body in idealized terms, as God's handiwork. The new realism was likely to show slack unidealized bodies in states of boredom or torpor. It is impossible to see the body as something whole and complete, and beautiful.
Classical Realist leader
Jacob Collins is an exception to this rule. He and his followers certainly see the body as something whole, complete and beautiful - but the question to ask is why?
Collins is also big on landscape, enough to attempt a revival of the
Hudson River School. James Panero, in the current
New Criterion, is skeptical. He explains that the original Hudson River School was seeking to capture God's glory as expressed in the natural world. He therefore charges Collins and company to ask, "Can there be a Hudson River School revival without the revival of God?" Panero even goes so far as to suggest that "to understand the Hudson River School today, Collins's students must learn to see themselves as seminarians as well as painters."
Panero's warning regarding landscape is Lewis's regarding the human figure. They both seem to suggest that when it comes to painting, theological infrastructure never hurts.
That said, infrastructure or not, up my grad stipend and I'd buy a Collins in a heartbeat.
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Old York
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Why do we love New York? Because, according to
this fine book by
Nathan Glazer, "its most recognizable icons predate the rise of high modernism in architecture and design." In other words, because it's
not new.
"New York is still, compared to Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, San Diego, cities that are new and growing faster, the old city. And in an age when things change so fast, that exerts some fascination."
And make no mistake, the old buildings didn't survive by accident. Thirty seconds of studying the tenets architectural modernity is sufficient to pick up on its patronizing disdain for the past.
The disdain demands resistance, and one of the reasons Glazer's insights are so nourishing is because he provided it - and not merely in a classroom. His was one of the prominent voices that protested the (now universally lamented) destruction of
Old Pennsylvania Station in 1964. The failure of that protest means that the New Jerseyan's welcome to New York is no longer
this, but, well...
this.
There is, however, a bright side: "It was such vandalism, effected or proposed, that expanded the preservation movement and made it a power." And so Old Penn Station can be considered an architectural martyr that laid down its life for its friends.
Can we expect anything like it in the future? I'll let Glazer explain:
"Not only would it embarrass architects to design decorative detail or call for it; they wouldn't know how to do it, and there would be no craftsman to provide it. The workmen who once carved and sculpted what seems like acres of decorated surface simply don't exist."
You'll pardon me if I continue to turn to Glazer for my architectural and urban criticism instead of to the
theorati.
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"Truth is Ugly"
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
I don't believe that, but Nietzsche did. In the same passage he says, "It is unworthy of a philosopher to say 'the good and the beautiful are one'; if he has the audacity to add 'so is the truth', he should be soundly beaten" (Schlechta 3:832). Notice you only get the actual beating if you add truth.
Why are theologians today - quick to laud goodness or beauty (
especially beauty) - still so afraid of Nietzsche? He's dead. He can't even swing.
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Pomo People
Thursday, August 14, 2008
I realize it's heretical to say that one can actually
understand (hence diffusing the power of) the supposedly impenetrable mystery that is (hushed silence please)... postmodern thought. Still, it is penetrable; and one of the reasons to read
First Things is because the journal clearly understood what a healthy, largely positive Christian relation to postmodernity involved
waaaaay back in
nineteen hundred and ninety-four (i.e. well before the cottage industry of books on the subject).
Still, even this is unremarkable considering the
first successful Christian engagement of
Pomo people occurred much earlier. Namely, from San Francisco area Spanish Catholic missionaries in the eighteenth century.
I'll be here all night.
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School of the Overpriced Ticket
Monday, August 11, 2008
The X-files series, it is too often forgotten,
ended with Mulder wanting to believe in "something greater than us - greater than any alien force." Mulder's final gesture was to reach through the smoke of conspiracy to embrace not just any religious symbol, but the cross hanging around Scully's neck.
I wanted to believe there would be something similar in
I Want to Believe, but even with that tease of a subtitle, it just wasn't there. I could barely find enough tread to justify Sacramone's "School of the Teachable Moment" (see
below). Should that fail, there's always "The School of the Overpriced Ticket," whose graduates seek to find something redemptive
despite a film because, and only because, of how much we paid to see it (witness
Borat).
Can, therefore, the ugly suffering that the latest
X-Files movie so gracelessly depicts be redeemed by the film's numerous visual references to "Our Lady of Sorrows"? Can Scully's wearied, suffering love for her patients be said to have a certain Marian element to it? Perhaps, but with a film this bad, even that seems forced. Believe me: I stepped in it; I know what it is.
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Chaff Mountain
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
"We live in an R-rated world," explains
Jeffrey Overstreet in this
lengthy dialogue, where he both justifies movie grit and once again proves himself head and shoulders above so many film critics, Christian or not. The primary enemy in said conversation, as it nearly always in among "culturally savvy" Christians, is unsavvy Christians who just can't see the light in the darkness. And that can be a shame. Convincingly, however,
Anthony Sacramone puts his finger on a danger, (one which no doubt Overstreet is
aware of). Says Sacramone:
Now I know the tendency among some Christian film critics to find the wheat, no matter how negligible, in any mountain of chaff can be taken to an extreme. They are members of what I call the "School of the Teachable Moment." Graduates of the school are convinced that virtually any film, no matter how egregious, can be redeemed if only we will take the time to look for hints of spirituality - even when there are none (sometimes especially when there are none).... But there are times when tolerance is intolerable. You have a right to sell dog food and you have a right to sell steak. What you don't have a right to do is sell dog food and call it steak.
I'm reminded of a time when I declared, as an undergraduate in
Ashley Woodiwiss' politics class,
The Devil's Advocate a profound gospel film. Woodiwiss' immediate reply: "You don't have to step in it to know what it is." Because the gospel is the world's true story, one can tease it out of any story. But the truly meritorious stories are the ones that tease it out of you.
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Every time a blogger blogs about blogging, the internet grows weaker. Still, pardon this indulgence. If you'd like to join the millinerd facebook blog network so I can know who some of you are, please click "join blog network"
here, or scroll down on the right hand side bar and click the facebook thing.
There, I did it. I blogged about my own blog. I feel dirty.
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