The summer fun season wanes and I welcome its slowly diminishing light and longer shadows. There have been some lakeside revels to be sure, and the ritual jumping of waves so high that sometimes you can see clear across to the bay. Meat has been duly seared. And there was a fraternal wedding to celebrate with high spirits. Much - too much perhaps - has been imbibed. But the highest days of sunlight, the real hot peaks of summer, brought sadness this year and it's still an untreatable ache in the back teeth of the my soul. No picnics, no barbecues, no ballgames can obscure the simple fact that I spent summer's most broiling day at the graveside of my father.
So perhaps it's no minor thing that my attention has been drawn to voices that challenge and sting, writers who refuse to accept a somnolent consumer summer of "recovery" and media, new digital toys and returning television favorites. Sure, I'm angry but there's no rational direction to my anger. There's no form, no ideology - in tandem, it seems, with many on the periphery of American politics. "Taking back our country," the bumper sticker of bland and unformed Tea Partyism, is familiar in tone to me, writ small. The urge to lash out can be strong.
Luckily, my reduced blog reading - and who among us hasn't reduced real blog reading in this age of Facebook "likes" and too-easy retweets - has brought the stress-reducing curled snarl of a smile to my lips. I don't always agree. But I appreciate. And I get in on the buzz, like a passed joint of hand-rolled skepticism.
Among the old newcritics crowd, everyone's favorite angry American is Dennis Perrin, whose propensity for calling out liberal hypocrisy is rivaled only by his willingness to over-share the still-dripping details of his personal life. No matter. The patient anesthetized upon the table needs the jolt of fully-charge paddles, which Dennis deftly and maniacally applies to mainstream Democrats in this bit on President Obama's earth-toned speech on the "end" of the Iraq War:
Obama's plea that Americans "turn the page" on Iraq, while predictable, is unnecessary. Apart from those families directly affected by the terror wars, most Americans really don't give a fuck about Iraq and haven't for some time. It was massive destruction in plain sight, yet few in the heartland showed any anger, concern, or active resistance. Iraq was a shadow war at high noon. And it hasn't ended, nor won't for some time, pious PR to the contrary. Many political observers concede this, but again, it doesn't register on a national level. Besides, there's the other holy war in Afghanistan to "win," plus the dire Iranian threat to our existence to defend against. Iraq is soooo Bush/Cheney. Move to the next Kindle file.
Correct, Dennis. No one cares. The plastic American flags whipping from car windows seven years ago lie in tatters in the back of the garage. We've moved on. We've got iPads! We've got Mad Men! Football season! We've got a proposed Islamic community center to blather on about! (Myself included). On the political scene, the conventional wisdom has a rudderless Democratic Party led by a remote and undramatic President headed for a mid-term disaster at the polls, clanging the bell for the return of Congressional Republican power and the requisite subpoenas and impeachment hearings that are their weapons of Washington warfare. To this CW, my friend Al Giordano (appearing like Zorro from summer hiatus) takes his trusty machete - and his point is a good one. The comic book short-hand - left disappointed in young, inexperienced President while the right is ascendant and fueled by anger in the heartland - ignores the local, or at very least, the regional imperative of all American politics. It layers the most rudimentary of analysis with thick lacquer. And it eschews any discusses. In re: that, Giordano -
In this sense, a political parody site like Wonkette has become more relevant to the 2010 midterm elections than the entirety of the so-called Netroots, which in 2006 became a kind of kingmaker in the Democrats’ midterm electoral triumphs. I tuned out completely on the Netroots blogs since June and only started browsing them again recently, and its as if they’re stuck on autopilot, still debating “Obama, good or bad” and blissfully disinterested in the midterm elections, certainly compared to where they were in 2006. On the eve of the 2010 elections, they’re still infighting like it’s 2009! Meanwhile, day in, day out, Wonkette is producing wonderful caricature profiles of the insane class of GOP congressional and senate nominees this year, and is actually driving the media discourse about them.
Likewise, the cable TV political shows on Comedy Central – The Daily Show and The Colbert report – have become far more relevant to the national political discourse than any host on MSNBC or even Fox, which has gone down the Glenn Beck rabbit hole in a manner that only increases the dysfunction inside the GOP. Fox and the “tea party” minions it has stoked are now the Republican Party’s own version of the 2010 Netroots: mirrors on each side of the partisan divide that seem more concerned with asserting their own illusory relevance and factional power than with actually getting out there and winning general elections in November.
Both Dennis and Al (who would not agree on Obama, by the way, and who I'd like to therefore introduce) kinda of make you want to add a simple inquiry chorus to their best blog posts: "do you, Mr. Jones?!"
Meanwhile, Lance Mannion - otherwise known as the R.A. Dickey of bloggers* - is generally slow to anger. But he's had enough of the Jonathan Franzen literary sales hype (and what else can it be called) and so he proceeds to take a bat the heads of the critical fawns, and in the style of DeNiro in The Untouchables. Oh, Lance might deny it - he's a uncommon gentlemanly blogger - but you can't argue with the splatter pattern analysis:
The literary powers that be, represented in the NPR piece and Ron Hogan’s post by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, routinely decide that an author or a book is IMPORTANT for reasons that seem to have little to do with questions of art or literary merit. The writer or his books---and it is usually a his---will be declared IMPORTANT because the subject is IMPORTANT.
ISSUES of the day are being tackled.
Something BIG is being said about the way we live now.
And we’re meant to read this IMPORTANT work in order to learn stuff. IMPORTANT stuff.
Besides that this sort of judgment values fiction as if its purpose was sociology, when books get pushed for their IMPORTANCE, I feel like I’m being assigned homework.
And this is the root cause of my Franzenfreude.
It’s good that a novelist has made the cover of TIME for the first time in a generation, and I guess it might as well be Franzen as anybody else, but he’s not there because the editors at TIME think he’s a great writer. He’s there because they’ve decided he’s news.
Yeah, oh reader. It all makes me feel better. There's too much counter-cultural power on the American right these days, and too much puffery on the left. Too much convention. Too much respect. Too much acceptance. Too much anointing. Too little hot sauce. Too little heat. Too little anger. So let this summer diminish and dip below the horizon. And let the hurricanes blow.
* Lance not only vaguely resembles the Mets' knuckerballing late-career success story, he always stays on the bench rooting for his teammates until the end of the game, just like Mr. Dickey.
