Author: Ophelia Benson

On a less frivolous note. There is this little matter of the Bush administration’s repeated, insistent attacks on the International Criminal Court, which I find massively depressing and disgusting. The Clinton administration wasn’t a great deal better, but I’m not sure they would have acted quite so aggressively as the Bush team, for instance actually bullying countries that don’t exempt the US from the Court’s jurisdiction. And I’m not sure they would have threatened to veto a UN resolution to protect humanitarian workers simply because it had the unmitigated temerity to mention the Court.

Yes I know the rationale: they’re afraid such a court would bring ‘frivolous’ prosecutions against US soldiers. Yes, but what if US soldiers do commit war crimes? What if there is another My Lai, for example? And then there’s the way the whole idea of international law is undermined if the most powerful country on the planet refuses to be subject to it. If we won’t, why should anyone else? And how do we think it makes us look to all those others? Like people who are planning to commit war crimes and want immunity in advance, is what it makes us look like. Appearances do matter.

Well which is it then? Is style, fashion, appearance, charm a frivolous self-absorbed trivial subject that people shouldn’t waste time on? Or is it fun, amusing, playful, campy, witty, and simply decently considerate of the people who have to look at us and live with us. Beats me. I don’t seem to have a coherent view on the subject. First I read this article which wonders among other things if too much concern with such things gets in the way of having a hungry mind.

Perhaps it doesn’t help either that the young are constantly presented with celebrity rather than excellence as their role model, with people who are rich and famous because they are cool, sexy or charming and who are not particularly gifted or talented, certainly not intellectually.

Then I read this one about ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ which after all of two and a half shows is already my favorite thing on tv. Well, style, fashion, appearance, and charm are what it’s all about. The whole premise is based on the notion that straight guys’ aesthetic cluelessness is not cute but either pathetic or Definitely Disgusting. I have a delightful time shrieking with laughter at the Five’s acidly disdainful comments on the poor shlubby guys’ clothes, furniture, housekeeping habits, kitchens, bathrooms, food, dishes, wall decorations, hair, skin, shoes, color sense, nails, tans, belts, bedspreads; and the cheerful dispatch with which they throw all the clothes on the floor, furniture out the door, food into the bin. Then when it’s over I look around at my…clothes, furniture, housekeeping habits, etc etc etc. I’m a good deal of a straight guy myself, if truth be told. I think I have some aesthetic sense, but I’m also not very dedicated about keeping things tidy, and I’m not a primper. The Five would have plenty of acid things to say about my clothes and nails and hair, I expect. So what am I laughing at?

Especially since I in fact do tend to think (and yes I know how Puritanical, judgmental, snobbish etc it sounds) it’s a stupid waste of time and attention to worry too much about one’s appearance. Even though I also realise how natural, understandable and in some ways useful or necessary it is. We all know about the endless studies that show how important appearance is, that show people think we are not only prettier if we’re prettier, but also cleverer, kinder, more competent, and better musicians. But I go on thinking it’s a waste of time anyway, because I’m a snobbish Puritan. But then I laugh like a drain at Queer Eye.

I’ve decided it’s the reversal. It’s amusing to see men being teased and mocked into paying as much attention to their appearance as women do. And that’s another reason I don’t agree with the New Republic article that Queer Eye is just the safe, tame version of gayness: I think it’s pretty earth-shaking to see straight men letting themselves be handled, mauled, flirted with and giggled over, and then happily set about baking marinated striped bass in their pretty kitchens. Now if five lesbians could start to teach straight women to be less girly, things could get interesting.

Now here we have a really fascinating article. It’s pertinent to a subject I’ve been worrying for days (and years and my whole life, really, but specifically for days here on B and W), the power and coerciveness of public opinion. We see that in politics, in ‘public relations’ and advertising, and we even (or perhaps especially) see it in the more mundane, secret, personal corners of life. In our friendships and romances, in how we feel at parties and meetings, at work and school, when we shop and see the doctor. Any time, in fact, that we’re not alone and unseen, public opinion is part of our landscape.

If you have diabetes or heart disease, you suffer regardless of who is watching you or how they perceive you. But the suffering that comes from being too short, too shy or too small-breasted is bound up with the way these characteristics are seen by other people.

Just so. We don’t mind from within being shy or short, we only mind insofar as we are consumer objects for other people. If other people prefer the tall and brash, the hip and the cool to short bashful geeks and nerds, and if we care what those Other People think of us, then we will do our best to stop being a short bashful geek and become hip and cool. But that transformation is so difficult – or it used to be, but now there is a pill. O brave new world. But do we remember to ask ourselves if we actually want to be hip rather than geeky? Or do we just go with the public opinion flow. And what of the loss involved when public opinion makes us all like one another, irons out all our oddities and wrinkles? And above all what of the anguish when the bullies still won’t leave us alone?

Kids pulled his tie so tight it nearly strangled him. They’d tease him about not having fancy gear. They’d call him ugly. He was buying ciggies and handing them out at the bus stop so that he’d be left alone. But after Christmas he tried to give up, and when he didn’t have cigarettes he’d get slapped across the face. No one wanted to play with him. No one wanted to be his friend. He got friendly with this one other lad and then he was accused of being gay. He just couldn’t respond in the way that other kids expected him to.

Be like us or else. Have the right gear, don’t be pudgy, don’t be clever or interested in politics. Don’t be shy or thoughtful or small-breasted or plain. So we mould and shape and form each other – distort and cripple and maim and stunt each other. It can be a high price to pay for fitting in and doing what the others expect.

But I already knew I disliked Alan Wolfe’s work – I just didn’t know quite how much. That’s how I found the comment about postmodernists, as a matter of fact: I was googling him to try to pin down exactly who he is and why he says such irritating things. Now I know he founded a Center for Religion, it all makes sense. I did a Note and Comment on an article of his a couple of months ago, one of the ones that disappeared when we had the server mishap, but I don’t think I’ll bother typing it back in, because the article in question is from the New Republic and it’s gone subscription. It was an irritating piece that kept telling us what ‘all Americans’ think, as if we all think exactly the same thing – but that, I am finding, seems to be Wolfe’s tactic of choice: to try to coerce all of us pesky dissenters and nonconformers into line by telling us that Everyone Thinks whatever it is so why the hell don’t we? For instance he does it in this article in Salon about the US ‘pledge of allegiance’, in which he complains about the atheists trampling on the wishes of the great, huge, vast, overwhelming majority.

Yet if society goes to the other extreme and bans from the public square any form of religious language, it violates the beliefs of all those who insist that religion is more than a matter of personal conviction, that faith is essential to how we Americans define ourselves collectively. In so doing, it may extend rights to nonbelievers or to those who believe in doctrines not widely accepted, but it does so at the cost of imposing a view of what America is about that others, in this case the majority of believers, do not share.

Well there you are then. ‘We’ Americans do this and ‘we’ Americans do that and if you don’t agree well then you must not be an American. You must instead be one of those horrible people ‘who believe in doctrines not widely accepted’. The nerve! How dare you have a view that the majority of believers do not share?!

Talk about coercive. Has the man never heard of de Tocqueville or Mill? Well of course he has, he’s not an ignoramus, but he doesn’t seem to have paid much attention. The tyranny of the majority holds no terrors for him. No doubt that’s because he believes the same things the majority of believers do, and bully for him, but truth isn’t decided by majority vote, and you’d think he’d know that. But never mind, he has a real clincher of an argument for us pesky atheists.

The only people excluded by the term are atheists. But since atheists define themselves against the religious beliefs of others, they should work to see the Pledge preserved, for without it, their very reason for taking public stands on these issues would be taken away from them.

Eh? I beg your pardon? I don’t ‘define myself against the religious beliefs of others,’ you ridiculous man. Why should I? I simply don’t share their beliefs. That doesn’t mean I need them in order to know what I think, and it certainly doesn’t mean I would feel a sense of loss if everyone were an atheist. He might as well say abolitionists should have worked to see slavery preserved, because without it, their very reason for taking public stands on these issues would be taken away from them. And what makes him think all atheists take public stands anyway? Oh never mind, he’s a believer, they’re impossible to argue with. And I haven’t even said why I was googling him, I haven’t commented on the irritating thing he said in his Afterword to C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which is what set me off. I’ll get to that later.

Now wait a minute. There is a limit. I can make fun of postmodernism as well as the next person, but it has to be actual postmodernism, not just any old thing I don’t happen to agree with. There’s no shortage of real, avowed, self-declared pomos out there, there’s no need to start expanding the pool by calling people postmodernist who aren’t.

By ‘engaging big issues with the depth of insight that social science can offer,’ Wolfe said, the Boisi Center will stand in ‘a great tradition’ reaching back to pioneering sociologists such as Max Weber, author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Emile Durkheim, author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, scholars who treated religion prominently in their inquiries. In the process, he said, the center will stand counter to postmodernist trends in scholarship which, by viewing human society solely through lenses of economic materialism or race, sex and class, ‘reduce human beings to people without souls or without minds.’

That’s from a comment by Alan Wolfe about his directorship of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, a Center whose very name makes me want to rush hastily away and set up camp on the margin. But that aside, surely Wolfe knows that postmodernists aren’t the first people to think about human beings without thinking about their ‘souls’. And note the sly trick of conflating souls and minds, as if they were synonyms. Well, I suppose that’s the kind of thing people do who found Centers for Religion and Public Life.

The subject of yesterday’s Comment interests me perhaps out of proportion to its importance…but then again perhaps not. It does involve certain habits of thought and silly ways of arguing (what one might call bad moves) that one finds in a lot of fashionable nonsense. Or to put it another way, there is some fashionable nonsense going on in Colgan’s diatribe.

For one thing there’s the sly business of motive-questioning – which in fact in cases like this surely backfires on the perpetrator. What does it amount to saying, after all? ‘There can’t possibly be a legitimate reason for thinking and writing that my novel is bad, therefore anyone who does think and write so must have some invidious motive.’ Surely the flaw there is all too embarrassingly obvious. ‘Why can there not possibly be a legitimate reason for thinking and writing that your novel is bad? Why is it ruled out in advance that your novel is in fact bad? Because you’re perfect? Because you’ve been given some special dispensation (from whom, by whom?) that prevents you from ever writing anything bad? Or is it just because you’re you? If it is just because you’re you, do you not realise that you are the only person who is you, and that as a result that ‘reason’ has no force whatsoever with anyone else on the face of the earth? Because all the rest of us are ourselves, and don’t put your claims ahead of our own? Life is like that, and you might want to start noticing that about now.’

I once saw Woody Allen make the same embarrassing mistake – definitely a bad move. He was being interviewed on the US tv program ‘Sixty Minutes’, and the interviewer (Morley Safer I believe) remarked in passing, in asking a searching question about Allen’s subject matter, that many of his friends didn’t much like Allen’s movies. Allen ignored the substantive question and instead began urgently asking Safer why his friends didn’t like Allen’s movies. Safer tried to brush that aside and get to the question he asked (he said something like ‘They just don’t, they’re not to their taste,’) but without success, Allen wanted an answer, he wanted to know Why. And then he said what I thought was an extraordinary thing. I’m paraphrasing but not much, he said something very like ‘Since they’re your friends they’re obviously intelligent people with good taste, why don’t they like my movies?’ The brazen flattery was surprising enough, but the assumption behind the question is downright stunning. Intelligent people with good taste like Woody Allen’s movies – always, apparently, according to Allen. Their failure to do so is an anomaly that requires explanation.

Beware, oh beware, turning into a person so confident of her own brilliance that she can’t wrap her mind around the idea that not everyone will love her work. And beware the back to front thinking that results. ‘There can’t be a legitimate reason for criticising my work, therefore there must be an illegitimate one, so I’ll just work out what it is and then announce it.’ No; that is not the best way to approach the subject.

And then another aspect is the guilt-trip one. This business of people ‘looking down their noses’. When you don’t have a good case, resort to political accusation, is apparently the thought. These mean wicked people who dare to say a harsh word about popular novels, they are mocking The People’s pleasures, they are horrible sneering monocle-wearing aristocrats. It’s a useful tactic in a sense, it does often work, but it’s dirty pool all the same.