Zadie Smith on Contemporary Literature

The best essay this year on the top rated book Netherland:

But in practice Netherland colonizes all space by way of voracious image. This results in many beauties ("a static turnstile like a monster's unearthed skeleton") and some oddities (a cricket ball arrives "like a gigantic meteoritic cranberry"), though in both cases, there is an anxiety of excess. Everything must be made literary. Nothing escapes. On TV "dark Baghdad glitter[s] with American bombs." Even the mini traumas of a middle-class life are given the high lyrical treatment, in what feels, at its best, like a grim satire on the profound fatuity of twenty-first-century bourgeois existence. The surprise discovery of his wife's lactose intolerance becomes "an unknown hinterland to our marriage"; a slightly unpleasant experience of American bureaucracy at the DMV brings Hans (metaphorically) close to the war on terror:

And so I was in a state of fuming helplessness when I stepped out into the inverted obscurity of the afternoon.... I was seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adopted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to the pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.

To which one wants to say, isn't it hard to see the dark when it's so lyrically presented? And also: grapefruits?

-Zadie Smith, NYRB

Wars of the Future

(This is an expansion and elaboration on the comments of the ID4 post)

America, the nation that has been the world's leading superpower for most of living memory, the nation that has not had ground warfare on its territory since the 19th century, and, the nation that compared to Europe, suffered very little during the World Wars of the 20th century, continues to fantasize about its own destruction like no other on Earth. Countless films like Independence Day, Transformers, War of the Worlds, etc. revel in orgies of destruction at the hands of singly evil-minded invaders.

These fantasies aren't recent. They see their origins in a subgenre of fiction, "future war", that developed in the late 19th century. These frequently racist stories taking took place usually 20 or so years into in the future, featured hordes of foreigners seeking to conquer the United States and Europe only to be driven back by white superiority and heroism. These stories frequently featured extensive descriptions of the catastrophic destruction of major landmarks of the time, most commonly the Brooklyn Bridge. (This is covered far more extensively in Howard Bruce Franklin's War Stars if you're interested.) Though thankfully stripped of their racist elements, modern-day incarnations of these nationalist apocalypse narratives retain a common essence: invading force cripples the world (ie the US) but is defeated in the end by the pluck, grit, and determination of a few valiant Americans.

The most famous of these future-war stories, War of the Worlds, is the one that most thoroughly subverts the genre. But wait, you say, I saw that movie, isn't it about Tom Cruise learning how to be a good father? Yes, the movie is about that, but the original story isn't. The original story has never been faithfully adapted. It is a bleak tale of humanity's humiliation and subjugation at the hands of merciless, faceless invaders that ends with humanity winning by a fluke. The rah-rah heroism of Spielberg's adaptation is one of the many flaws of that film. But even the role-reversal imperialism of War of the Worlds fails to address the ultimate problem with these stories, with far more problematic implications than nationalism.

When the enemies are aliens or otherworldly creatures, it is easy to overlook the fact that these stories tend to end with genocide. It is a relief to see that our future enemies in today's incarnations of these stories are no longer Chinese, Africans, and other ethnic minorities. The 19th-century future war are a terrifying display of the ubiquity of the racism of the era. In the same way the aliens/invaders are subjugated or even out-and-out exterminated (WotW, ID4) in the modern versions of these stories, the original versions frequently advocate actual genocide against non-white ethnicities. The most famous of these would have to be "The Unparalleled Invasion" by Jack London (yes, the Jack London) where, in the climax of the story, the entire Asian race is exterminated via bacteriological warfare. This depicted as a good thing.


To my knowledge, only one story, Ender's Game for all its flaws, addresses the inherent genocide of these stories, but not explicitly. In Ender's Game the genocide is the ultimate expression of the novel's underlying philosophy, that morality is dependent entirely upon intention (more on that argument here).

We conceive of ourselves as good and inviolably sacred. We must eradicate evil, or those that would threaten us. Even someone as revered as Saint Obama holds this opinion: during the presidential debates he said, verbatim, "We will crush Al-Qaeda and kill bin Laden." Crush and kill. Opposing ways of life cannot coexist. This is why the natives of the continent were so brutally driven from their land. Their way of life could not be made compatible with ours. We were the ones with the numbers and the guns, so we prevailed.

This is why September 11 shook us so badly, the catastrophic destruction of a national landmark exactly in the manner of our fantasies. "It's like something out of a movie," any number of bystanders were heard to have said that day. This is why a single terrorist attack could yield so much political leverage.

The stories of future wars are the secret fear we have that someday we won't have the numbers and guns. That someday the might of another nation or people (even if they are alien) will prove our way of life will be the wrong one, and that we may no longer continue existing. We always win in the end in these stories, and that is why we love them. They validate us.

Symbols in the Absolute Most Obvious Sense

[N.B. Per the name of this exploration, Axis Monday shall feature its lengthiest and most in-depth discussions on Mondays. Conveniently (and all unknowing) Demosthenes fulfilled this need for me with his labyrinthine Manifesto]




The most obvious symbols, in a very literal sense, are the letters of the alphabet. They are arbitrary drawings which our culture has imbued with meaning. This is no revelation to you, nor should it be. Naturally, we are so used to these symbols that they hold no great wonder for us anymore. See? Check it out:

XR

Totally uninteresting. Letters, nothing more. A morass of meaninglessness, a quagmire of the quotidian (I'm pretty pleased with that alliteration). Now reverse it.

Suddenly two letters, written in a somewhat stylized manner but still very clearly recognizable as letters, unlock a whole new world of meaning.

Every one of you knows that these two letters, written in this way, mean "prescription." I dare say most of you would make the same association (with less certainty) if I merely wrote

RX

Or more so for

Rx

?

I'm curious; let me know if I am wrong.

But I also bet that none of you could tell me why 'RX' means 'prescription.' Of course, this has no effect on your actual understanding of the symbol.

[For those interested: nobody seems to know exactly where RX acquired this connotation. In the absence of truth, I shall accept the most whimsical theory: that the symbol somehow looks like the Eye of Horus.
I enjoy such a spirit of imagination. Other theories involve Latin mumbo-jumbo and are much less interesting. All are dubious.]

Although the origins of the symbol are lost, it retains its meaning.

That covers the profane.

Onto the sacred.

Reverse the letters again. Superimpose them upon each other. And two mere letters, images which bring particular phonemes to mind, transmute into the most powerful image of Orthodox Christianity.

The Labarum!

In hoc signo vinces. En touto nika. In this sign you shall conquer.

Constantine the Great reputedly saw this sign in a dream before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. And, so the story goes, he adopted that very sign as his personal standard. And won the battle against Maxentius, and became Emperor, and ended Roman oppression of Christianity. Years later, on his deathbed, he converted.

Thus, the first two letters of Christ's name became the de facto battle standard of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire, and a powerful religious symbol as well. The symbol has two names: the labarum (etymology unclear), and more simply the Chi-Rho (the two letters; basically, the XR).

We could talk about semantics and semiotics and how symbols acquire meaning, and perhaps we shall in the comments, but my point is simpler.

Some of the symbols we often see are abstract, e.g. the American flag or the crescent moon and star(s) emblazoned on many Islamic flags. Others are more literal: the other great Christian symbol, the cross. A stylized picture of a man, indicating a men's restroom. The elements that compose these symbols are fairly obvious to those who know them.

But the fusion of two letters, symbols in themselves but related in an indirect or forgotten way to the new symbol, can merge to form a greater whole. From a convenient scribble to save ten letters, to a triumphant sigil embodying one of Christianity's greatest epiphanies.

A Manifesto

Celebrate naiveté! Embrace earnest emotion! The post-ironic backlash against cynicism and sarcasm has fully descended. To keep up the Presidential theme, it seems fair to declare this trend in full effect after all the fawning over "Change" and "Yes We Can," especially amongst younger crowds and the web-savvy. To start a blog aspiring to find the "the wonderful in the mundane" or "the mundane in the wonderful" seems like an excellent opportunity to cash in on the great upswelling of sentimentality.

But the internet has long been at the vanguard of this new culture: the earliest and most successful blogs like BoingBoing.net and Kottke.org have long dedicated themselves to curating the best new niches of heartfelt, bite-sized webtainment. To start another such blog in this day and age is becoming cliché.

BoingBoing describes itself as "a directory of wonderful things," while Kottke coopts the nostalgic language of cottage capitalism at his "home of fine hypertext products." It is no longer surprising to see BoingBoing hoisting the banners and raising its army of emotion-heavy but content-light readers to fight the latest in technological injustice: the rally against DRM or the rally for closing the digital divide! While many of the causes seem weak in comparison with real social-ills, the emotional power invested in them is strong.

Meanwhile Kottke documents the incestuous constellation of wonder-lovers. He regularly regularly points to Gladwell, the TED conference, This American Life, McSweeney's, Wired (all that it entails) and back to BoingBoing; before long a reader is surrounded by twitter feeds, unrealized intellectual ambitions, the comedy of the quotidian or the latest quick technological fix that will change the world. An individual wearing thick glasses (just like ours!), toiling in obscurity to document every appearance of the axis mundi in Czech movie posters (1960-1985) on their flickr account is hailed as the great artiste of the Long Tail economy.

But where are we left with all this conviction? Political correctness (or "liberal dreams as rules, not feelings") led to the intellectual policing of a properly tolerant society. It failed in its mission to lead us toward Barney the Dinosaur's utopia of diverse harmony. Instead it became rotten and gave way to hardened, fearful realists and the snide commentary of South Park.

Irony quickly stepped in to help us maintain emotional distance from the farce of "correct liberal thought," but clutching to the comfort of sardonic wit like a well-worn comfort blanket has gone out of vogue.

The new task before us is twofold: we must go forward with our hearts on our sleeves; finding examples of virtue and beauty for show and tell. But we also have to address the limits of idealism without complete dismissal -believing in ideas while holding them to the fire and embracing the most embarrassing criticisms.

The need is to overcome the pride inherent in cynicism without succumbing to the coddling, fuzzy warmth of Panglossian feeling.

We ultimately need a new definition of wonder in this new mold; one that loves the profane as much as the sacred --the grime as much as the sheen. We will no longer have to catalogue the wonderful and the mundane because they will be the same.

The low hanging fruit is gone; the blunderers who have come before may have been misguided and unfocused, but they have already scoured the commons. We will have to aspire to greater heights because the wonderful and the mundane is ultimately profound --and it is here our predecessors have all stumbled.

So be warned, for:

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. -Demosthenes

Mythologizing JFK

This classic Internet film perfectly showcases and parodies what I was discussing below.



The following line sums up the mythologization of any president, and captures the spirit of what Obama has been doing:

"Even though I'm better than you, I am not."

Presidents must simultaneously deify and humanify themselves. JFK and Obama have succeeded on both counts, and this film takes that to its logical extreme.

I don't need to say anything else, except that if you haven't seen this video before, shame on you, and go watch the one about George Washington.

All Your Myths Are Belong to Obama

Via Kotaku:

Out of all the things one could talk with President-Elect Obama, someone apparently brought up this: "All your base are belong to us." That's right, the funny English phrase from Zero Wing turned internet meme. In a one-of-us-one-of-us thread over at Scifi site Tor.com in which Obama's geekatude is being discussed, one commenter recounted a story from a friend who claims to have interned for the Obama presidential campaign:

The job involves getting him something to eat, maybe playing a little basketball with him, and basically chatting and getting whatever he needs between important things. During the conversation, apparently Zero Wing came up.

You know, the Sega Genesis video game. I don't know how.

And apparently, my friend made the off-hand comment of "All your base are belong to us".

And Obama leaned forward in his chair, quirked his eyebrow a bit, and responded "What you say?"

Presidents are not normal people. You do not meet them on the street; you do not have anything significant in common with them. They are utterly beyond the reach of normal men.

Even Obama, who presented himself as an everyman, and in many ways is one, is still the instrument of a vast political machine; he has his 'handlers,' though he may resent them; he is a Democrat, the chosen son of the vast and faceless apparatus of government. The transformation of a man from a long-shot candidate to the world's most powerful human being cannot leave him untouched; by being elected, he has left his mortal vestiges behind.

Like the Greek gods, presidents are beyond approach. They are very like humans, but of a higher order, with vastly greater power. Therefore, just like the Greeks did with their gods, we mythologize Obama. Every subculture seeks to make him their own (Except the Republicans).

The story from Kotaku shows exactly how this is done. The rumor establishes Obama firmly as part of the nerd culture--along with the better supported stories that he is a Trekkie. The veracity of the rumor does not matter. This is how subcultures identify with the unapproachable divine--they create a myth and thus make the divine a patron of their particular beliefs, and thus more accessible.

Apollo, god of reason, light, wisdom, music, the cave, wolves; Athena, wisdom, olives, war, the eponymous city. Each god's domains relate, but not closely. Study the evolution of the myths of these gods and you will see how greatly they vary over time and from place to place, as each era and culture makes a deity their own.

It is our natural instinct to make Obama the president of whatever group we most identify with, whether or not it's true.

Obama, patron god of change, the American Dream, African Americans, post-racialism, internationalism, basketball, grassrootsism, and geek chic.

We make him not the country's president, but our president.

The Freedom Tower - A Lasting Symbolism

Behold the Freedom Tower!
(Artist's conception, obviously)

9/11 destroyed a powerful symbol of America's dominance, even as the events that followed destroyed America's actual dominance.

The Freedom Tower, originally intended to be completed and dedicated on September 11, 2011 (Anniversaries hold power), has been delayed; its current height above ground is 13 feet. So it won't be done quite on time. Nor will it be the tallest building in the world. That honor goes to the still uncompleted Burj Dubai, a triumph of the same architectural firm.

[Look at that picture and tell me that it won't be the new Axis Mundi for the secular Arab world (the non-secular Arab world will keep the same Axis Mundi it has always had). Also, crazy Brits have BASE jumped off it (Man triumphing over nature? Over the sacred? Over rent-a-cops? You decide).]

To the point: The Freedom Tower does not seek the ephemeral title of world's tallest building. Only three structures held onto that title for more than a hundred years: Lincoln Cathedral, Strasbourg Cathedral, and the Great Pyramid (which held the title for a rounding error short of four thousand years).

Who knows how long the Freedom Tower will be the tallest building in NYC and America? But even after it is surpassed, it shall bear a more powerful symbolism than "I used to be the biggest kid on the block." It's The Freedom Tower. And it will be 1776 feet tall.

Funny how that works.


P.S. The Empire State Building was a profound sign that the Depression would not destroy America. Perhaps this Freedom Tower shall say the same thing in 2013.