Tuesday, January 06, 2004
(2:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Blog Post in Three Parts
I.
After months of having the "subjectively objective" image as my wallpaper, I have decided to change to this piece by Kandinsky, entitled Yellow, Red, Blue. (The large image file is basically a big "screw you" to our poorer readers who cannot afford the high-speed Internet access that we enjoy here at the Chez Kotsko.) If I lived in downtown Chicago, I like to think that I would get a membership to the Art Institute and go a few times a week. In the past month especially, I have had a deep hunger for the arts -- for painting, sculpture, classical music, poetry -- but I have only had the money to feed it with a couple articles in the New Yorker and the same classical CDs I've had since high school. For a few fleeting moments, I considered going into law or business so that I would have the means to enjoy high art, as though selling out would be worth it if I went to the symphony and spent my weekends reading Yeats.
II.
I am not quite finished with this article by Leo Marx, but I highly recommend what I have read thus far. It is particularly interesting to me given some questions I asked a while back about whether the American ideal could provide any real avenues for change (i.e., a left-wing political project). Leo Marx captures a moment in American history when that seemed to be the case:
That intermittently dormant [adversary] culture [previously exemplified in abolitionism] reawakened in the 1930s, and many Americanists whom I knew renounced capitalism on the grounds that its inequities violated core principles of American democracy. Even the most radical anarchists and revolutionaries of the era invoked those national ideals. One heard tales of union organizers and Wobblies getting themselves arrested by reading the Declaration of Independence on street corners. In 1939, when I heard Earl Browder, chairman of the Communist Party, USA, address a large crowd in the Boston Garden, he stood beneath a huge banner that read "COMMUNISM IS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM." The pre-World War II decade also was marked by an unusually energetic burst of nationalistic expression in the arts. Patriotic themes are a conspicuous presence in the middlebrow and popular music, painting, and literature of the 1930s, as well as in the writing of popular theorists like Sidney Hook and Max Eastman, who effected what Denning describes as an Americanization of Marxism. Adherents of the cultural front in that period were more committed--and, oddly enough, more hopefully committed--to the tradition of radical egalitarianism than Americans have been at any other time of my life. That commitment has been described as an expression of fervent cultural nationalism, but we didn't see it that way. In our 1930s lexicon, nationalism was a reactionary habit of mind, a seedbed of xenophobia and fascism. Our Left was internationalist. Our heroes were the American volunteers fighting fascism in Spain under the banner of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Our Left was committed, or so we believed, to the universal, egalitarian values of the Enlightenment represented by Jefferson, Paine, and Lincoln.
The beginning of the American Studies movement in American academia, an interdisiplinary "non-discipline" whose subject was "America," provide a focal point for leftist intellectuals, whose claims were bolstered by the failure of the capitalist system in the 1930s. Their very belief in "America" allowed them to be the greatest critics of America:
To mobilize opposition to slavery, egregious forms of capitalist exploitation and injustice, and unjust wars, leaders of these dissident movements affirmed their provisional belief in the idea of America. It was a compelling means of exposing the discrepancy between a real and an ideal America or, as Melville put it on the eve of the Civil War, between the world's foulest crime and man's fairest hope.
It's as if the only way out is through. The only way to provide justice is for America to make good on its broken promises. In Marx's view, however, many professional Americanists were completely disillusioned by the Vietnam War, and after that, the American Studies department became something of an Anti-American Studies department. In the face of such a complete betrayal, the betrayed ideal itself became suspect, as if the ideal had known all along that it was being used, as if no one had ever intended to live up to it -- as if the idea of America were nothing but a peculiar Enlightenment version of the opiate of the people.
III.
A few weeks ago, while driving around the margins of Chicagoland looking for a Christmas gift for my parents, I was listening to A Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor was telling the story of his failed attempt to get hired on at The New Yorker, and he concluded by saying, "I was afraid of living an ordinary life when I came to New York, and I realized that's what we all get. We all get an ordinary life, and it's good enough. It's good enough." Immediately, someone began playing "Clare de Lune."
It was one of the most effective radio moments I've heard in my life. If you never listen to the show on the radio, I recommend listening to it using the link above -- even if it used to be a lot better in the 1980s or something before it sold out, it's still a great show. Another comparable radio moment occurred more fortuitously, as I was driving home for Christmas. I was driving through one of the most run-down parts of Kankakee, and John Lennon's "Imagine" came on the radio. Looking at the waste all around me, Lennon's lyrics seemed to mean the exact opposite of what they had meant before: "Imagine there's no heaven. It's not hard if you try" -- it really wasn't that hard. John Lennon seemed to me, at that moment, to be a pompous ass who knew nothing about anything. In communities like Kankakee, religion is truly the only hope, the only possible force that can help people overcome self-destructive behavior, bind communities together peacefully, and give people hope and meaning. Enlightenment idealism is not going to cut it -- Enlightenment idealism is a religion for white, middle-class people. It can never be a religion for the downtrodden.
