Author: Ophelia Benson

There was a slightly bizarre article about ‘elitism’ and popular culture in the New York Times a couple of days ago. At least I thought it was bizarre, but I don’t know, maybe it’s not, maybe I’m the one who’s bizarre. Or elitist. Or both.

Elitist pop-culture critics must, in the end, be mindful of what large numbers of people actually see and read and listen to. Because the underlying mythology of pop culture is still the idea that the approval of large numbers of people validates that culture and the society that produces it. If something is truly loved by millions of people, it has touched those people, has tapped into some stream of universality that indicates a life force attenuated in more elitist art…No single work of art can appeal to everyone. But when a movie like “Titanic” is seen all over the world, it suggests that its director, James Cameron, has reached down to artistic bedrock. Or when people throughout the United States, watching at home on their isolated television screens, are riveted by the final episode of “Sex and the City,” that helps bind us together.

Um…a movie like ‘Titanic’? He couldn’t have come up with a better example than that? Because I gotta tellya, the fact that that movie was seen all over the world (and multiple times by girls age 12-15) doesn’t suggest to me that James Cameron has reached down to artistic bedrock (whatever that might mean). But then I guess I don’t have to buy that idea, because I also don’t buy the idea that the approval of large numbers of people ‘validates’ anything, frankly. Whatever ‘validates’ might mean. No – I’m afraid I hold the heretical view that even large numbers of people can be wrong about things. Maybe I’m too familiar with opinion polls and surveys – you know, the ones that say 47% of Americans think human beings were created by the deity six thousand years ago, and 90% of us (or is it 95, or 99) believe in a personal god. Not to mention whatever enormous percentage it is that can’t find the US on a map, and doesn’t know what century the Civil War took place in, and don’t know who the Allies were in WWII. But that’s only part of it. There’s also the fact that tastes change, and that some kinds of taste or appreciation are cumulative and are not universally taught, and that mawkish sentimentality for instance can have very broad appeal but that doesn’t make it good, or even ‘validate’ it.

There’s a sly equation that often gets made or assumed in these discussions. The fact that the popular is not automatically bad becomes another fact (which is not a fact) that says the popular is automatically good. But guess what, those are two different ideas and the one doesn’t follow from the other. But dang the people who like to beat up on putative elitists sure rely on it heavily – as Stephen King did in his notorious recent outburst at the National Book Awards.

And as for being bound together by the final episode of – oh well. I suppose I know what he means about that. However reluctantly. I have to admit I was pleased when ‘The West Wing’ once made a big fuss about the fact that they were going to re-run the show that the public had voted their favourite – and I watched, curious to see if I had the same favourite as other people, and found that I did. Okay, I like to be like other people once in awhile, as long as it’s not too often. As long as it’s not too often and not too ridiculous – but I’ll be damned if I’m going to like ‘Titanic’!

Time for another omnium gatherum, because I have a lot of little items, with not much to say about them, and no single larger item with a lot to say about. At least I think that’s what I have, though sometimes I discover when I start typing that I have more to say than I thought. Isn’t that always the way. Blather blather. Just ask my colleague, who tries his best to get a little work done in the intervals between my outbursts of talkativity, or whining, or both.

One item. I commented a few days ago on that April Fool’s comment in the Guardian, along with various comments on the comments. But I forgot to mention the one on normblog, which is very good.

But let us assume, just for the sake of a standard piece of dnoc hand wringing, that the men are in fact guilty as suspected. Wouldn’t one then have to know rather a lot more than the Guardian possibly can do at this point, about the precise lines of cause and effect between their backgrounds, their experiences, their characters, ideological influences on them, their motives, and so on, before being able to draw big broad conclusions about why they were planning what they were? Unless, that is, we’re all guilty of the crimes to be committed against us until we’re actually blown to bits (and even then we may be guilty of them in some people’s eyes).

Hand-wringing. It can get to be a habit, almost a conditioned reflex. I think I used to have the habit a little myself, as no doubt a lot of us do. You know, the half-formed thought – ‘Yes but why did they -‘ which may then get deflected by the next thought, which could be ‘Never mind why, it was the wrong thing to do’ or ‘You don’t know and no one knows yet so shut up’ or ‘Oh not that again’ or ‘Because they felt like it, probably.’ Or any number of other thoughts. Hand-wringing can be a needed corrective, of course, and part of the picture, but there can be a good deal too much of it.

Another item. Philip Stott had some innocent fun with competing metalanguages and powerful hegemonic myths. He also has an interesting post on Cyberspace and science.

And one more, that I meant to link to days ago, or was it weeks. Scott McLemee read that lovely bit of parodic-nonparodic wisdom I posted in News last week, and was inspired to do a metaparody of his own, having to do with Funyums. See April 7. (I should have linked to it immediately, and then you would have seen it in parallel text. Nobody’s perfect.)

A reader sent me a link to the Washington Post article on Hindutva last night, and along with it a link to a post on the subject at his blog. I’m always so pleased to find new allies.

To Mr. Malhotra: if you disagree with the arguments and methods of these scholars, debate them respectfully. If you feel they are ignorant of the subjects they study, by all means educate them. But leave your speculations about their personal sexuality out of it. And leave off referring to Professor Doniger as “Wendy.” This strange tendency of Malhotra’s (he keeps referring to “Wendy’s Child Syndrome”) almost begs us to “reverse psychoanalyze” him, specifically his weird obsession with western female scholars of Hinduism.

Indeed. It’s a familiar tactic. Very familiar – in fact haven’t we talked about it here at some point? We have. The waiting socialists – remember them? Their last vituperative explosion at me – I counted: they called me by my first name eight times. That’s a lot of times to mention someone’s name, and then there’s the first name aspect. Interesting. A week or two ago they had another one of their vituperative explosions, this one directed at Chris Bertram of Twisty Sticks, but oddly enough they never called him by his first name. It was either Chris Bertram or Bertram throughout, whereas I was ‘Ophelia’ over and over again. Why is that, I wonder. But I don’t wonder very much – because I think I can guess, and I think it’s the same reason Malhotra calls Wendy Doniger ‘Wendy.’ It’s an expression of contempt, an effort to demean and condescend and patronize, and it’s a tactic used on women far more often than it is on men. It seems to come kind of naturally to use it on women. At least, I don’t know why else people who claim the socialist and moral high ground would resort to it in such an unreflective way. I mention this not to rake up old nonsense but to point out a bad, stupid, retrograde, illegitimate bit of sexist behavior. People ought to stop doing that. And well done Amardeep Singh for pointing it out.

Dr Singh also says this in another post:

Also annoying are the attempts to culturalize rationality. These are particularly unhelpful when dealing with the Hindu right in India or radical Islam in the Arab world. It is not a sell-out to colonialism to claim that reason is universal.

As I said – new allies are a joy. And there is a new group of allies getting together in Geneva. Hurrah!

Women’s groups from Europe, North America, North Africa and the Middle East said they had founded an alliance to fight religious “fundamentalism”, both Islamic and Christian, and what they called its oppression of women…Habibeh Nafisi, leader of an organisation of Tunisian women living in France, said women in Moslem communities there were under increasing pressure to conform to strict rules laid down by male religious leaders, including wearing “Islamic dress”.This included the hijab headscarf, which France is banning in schools from the autumn of this year despite protests from hardline Moslem leaders and some women who say the move is a violation of their rights.

I wonder why this site feels compelled to put ‘fundamentalism’ in quotation marks though. Is it considered ‘offensive’ to use that word? Is there some doubt about what the word means, or whether the phenomenon it refers to exists? At any rate – there is also this interesting bit:

At a separate meeting, former Moslems who have abandoned the faith for other religions or for humanism, told journalists the world body had become “infused with political correctness” and could not openly discuss oppression in Islamic countries. The group, including prominent writer on Islamic issues Ibn Warraq, is campaigning for the UN to condemn the practice they say still exists in some Moslem countries of persecuting or executing “apostates” who renounce the faith.

We think of Ibn Warraq as a friend of B&W’s, since we had the privilege of publishing an article of his last year. I try to be modest and humble, but it does make me puff up a bit to be allied however remotely with the work Ibn Warraq is doing. Allies are wonderful.

This is a trivial item in the great scheme of things, but I can’t help finding it intensely amusing. So I thought I would share it. I lapsed into frivolity for a few moments yesterday – I frittered away a little time and energy in mocking a reactionary commenter at Twisty Sticks. I know that’s a silly thing to do, but I felt like it. Come on. Some people watch football, some play golf, I occasionally mock commenters on blogs. I don’t do it for hours and hours every day for crying out loud so lighten up already! It was just a few minutes.

Okay, I know, it is stupid, but in this particular case it paid off handsomely. A few minutes after I posted my last tease and ran away for some hours, the object of my brutal mockery posted a retort. I thought he must be teasing me in his turn – but couldn’t help hoping he wasn’t, that it really wasn’t a joke. And for once, dear children, I did not hope in vain. It wasn’t a joke. Now behold why I am so pleased:

Ophelia, you and rhetoric? I suggest you have a look at the “Woolly Thinker’s Guide” at Butterflies and Wheels — an excellent egghead site you might benefit from familiarising yourself with. Particularly the sections ‘clumsy sarcasm’, ‘histrionics’ and ‘moral one-upmanship’. You’ll find it here

Well. You have to admit, that’s not a bad little treat. A certain sensation of vertigo, of self-referentiality, of being lost in a hall of mirrors – but in a good way. Maybe in a few months I’ll start picking fights with strangers on buses and in shops, in hopes that they will whip The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense out of their pockets and wave it in my face, ordering me to study it. That would be fun! The picking fights, I mean, but the rest of it would be fun too.