According to Harold Bloom, “What we are seeing is…the fall of America”
by Eva Sohlman
– Sweden –
Harold Bloom, Yale literature professor and cultural critic, is one of America’s most prominent and provocative intellectuals. Unabashedly, he has always spoken up for what he calls “the fight for truth and beauty” making a lot of foes in the process, but also some friends. As one of the first critical voices against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, Bloom landed in the hot seat with the satire “MacBush” in 2004. Lately, he sparked worldwide outrage by calling Harry Potter “garbage”. Speaking at his home in New Haven where he is recovering from a recent health scare, a pale and weak Bloom seems to have symbolically embodied what he calls the “poor state of the nation”.
“I am 77 years old and I have never seen this country in such a bad state. It is madness. What we are seeing is the fall of the Roman Empire, only now it is the fall of America, the glory of our Empire. This war is what Parthya was to Rome.
“The horror of what is taking place in Iraq exceeds my worst fears five or six years ago (after Bush came to power). I am horrified at the disastrous mistake involved. Imagine the complete madness in trying to occupy a large Arab country in the middle of the Arab world, a culture we know precious little about, and who speaks a language only a handful of our specialists can speak, with armed forces which we have limited control of and with a large army of private soldiers… The whole thing is a scandal…a series of lies. I don’t understand the motivation for the war, but suspect the real reason for the war, which one would suspect of a country which is a third oligarchy, a third plutocracy and a third theocracy, is that it simply is a profitable machine.”
Sitting in the middle of his living room and in the brown leather armchair from which he has given most of his interviews in recent years, Bloom sighs deeply and a sad grimace spreads over his expressive face. It soon switches to anger, as he expands on the consequences of the war and, ultimately, of Bush at power: a growing national debt and a weakened dollar in tandem with a spiraling war budget, as well as America’s lost credibility on the international stage due to the Iraq war and the situation in Afghanistan. Not to mention Guantanamo Bay, the use of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s rendition program.
“We have caused a monstrous mess. We don’t even count killed Iraqis. God knows how many Iraqi women, children and men have been killed by our accidental shootings, which we are such experts at, or by other Iraqis. No, ‘Benito Bush’ (Bloom’s pet name for President George Bush) deserves, if we had a functioning civil law in the world, to be condemned for crimes against humanity. Bush is ultimately responsible for this war,” Bloom says pointing angrily with his index finger in the air as his dark eyes burn below a pair of thick dark eyebrows and a crown of unruly white hair.
“It is bleeding our nation, and I can’t see a solution in the near future. We are obviously so deeply involved concerning blood, money and the situation on the ground that it will be very hard for us to pull out.”
But Bloom has no illusions that there is any real pressure from the Democrats to pull out of Iraq at the moment.
“The truth is that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hoyer and the other Democrats who lead the Congress Party in the Senate, are far too cunning. They will talk about wanting to end the war and so on, but the truth is that they know they can’t do anything about it and it suits them as they can blame the Republicans for the war in the upcoming elections. But the ugly truth is that we can’t stop the war now. We are responsible for Iraq now. We have crushed it so now we own it. I have never seen this country (America) in such a bad state. But how big a percentage who actually cares, I don’t know.”
If the war in Iraq is the most palpable example of the decline of America under Bush’s reign, Bloom cites the U.S. media as another casualty.
“’Media-ocrity’ is what I call it. It is awful what kind of media we have today. Nobody dared to stand up and criticize Bush when he unlawfully went to war on Iraq. It is depressing, and shows what direction this country has taken since he came to power – a power which did not rightfully belong to him. The media is not playing its role. The Bushites are bullies and for a long time nobody dared criticize them and just swallowed their propaganda and lies. People have become scared. In this kind of climate, nobody is interested in the critical voice. You ask about the role of the intellectual in America today and I have to say: What role? What intellectuals? There is no room for them in the simplified and dumbed down world of today’s media. We used to play a role, and there are still a few left, but we are a dying breed. Nobody seems to be interested in nuance anymore.”
This is where the real danger lies, he says.
“Democracy, whether in Sweden or the United States, depends on the voter’s capacity to think. If you have read the best of what has been thought and said, then your cognition and understanding is on a much higher level than if you have read Harry Potter or Stephen King. So what this decline into half-literature and mediocre media really means is de facto a self-destruction of democracy.”
“Political correctness is the death for the mind, for literature. I am terribly outspoken and don’t try to hide it. I care passionately and I say so. I want quality when it comes to everything, and insist on it. I believe in the aesthetics, the beauty of good literature and I believe in wisdom. People get angry because of that and think it is an attack on them.”
•
Harold Bloom has long been a central, yet lone, figure in the American cultural debate.
In the 1950s, he battled T. S. Eliot, whose New Criticism then reigned in literature classrooms. In the 1970s, he sparred with the Deconstructionists, a group of mostly European intellectuals who argued language was essentially devoid of meaning. In the 1990s’ Culture Wars, Bloom, who advocated an aesthetic approach to literature against feminist, Marxist, new historicist, postmodernist, and other new methods of academic literary criticism, found himself facing off against feminist and multiculturalist critics after publishing “The Western Canon,” which many found too biased towards white male writers. A great admirer of William Shakespeare and a defender of the 19th century Romantic poets, Bloom has written some 30 books, notably the influential “The Anxiety of Influence” and “The Book of J,” which makes the unorthodox claim that parts of the Bible were written by a woman.
“I don’t think most people understand me, but that is life. I am often portrayed as an anti-feminist. Of course, I am not against women’s equal rights in society. It would be madness and unintelligent not to support that. What I am against is applying a political agenda to literature. It kills it.”
Contemplating his own legacy and work, Bloom describes himself an anarchist who refuses to adhere to any school or paradigm; “an agnostic Jew” who takes great pride in always having encouraged his students to go their own way — manifested by the fact that “none of his former students’ work resembles the other.”
“I might be remembered as what I myself disparagingly call a ‘period piece,’ a rather large period piece. One tries to justify one’s existence, one wants to believe one can do something good with a life of teaching, writing and reading.”
Once at the center of the American intellectual debate, Bloom today considers himself a marginalized guerilla fighter – an old dinosaur with the self-invented nickname “Bloom Brontosaurus”.
“(Big sigh) We lost the war. What can I say? Nobody is interested in quality any more.”
But supporters and fans still write Bloom, like the teacher who describes the discussion she has had with her students.
Bloom, now sitting at the computer in the salon, reads her email aloud:
“Some of them are quite upset with your harsh words regarding the Harry Potter books, as you can imagine. As a teacher I love the article and agree wholeheartedly with you, and so now we wonder if you are still out there writing more controversial articles.”
Looking up bemused, Bloom responds, “How funny!” and asks his wife, Jeanne, to type his reply:
‘As I am getting very old, I must avoid any quarrels. With best regards, Harold Bloom.’
Bloom sighs again, puts his hand on his forehead while slowly shaking it, and says with a resigned smile: “But you are right, Jeanne. What is one known for? To have attacked Harry Potter and Stephen King!”
About the Author
Eva Sohlman is a Swedish journalist and writer with credentials in print, radio and TV. She is presently Editor and Producer of The World in Focus (“Världen i Fokus”), a Swedish TV program which reports world news and in-depth studio interviews. The show follows Eva’s international career reporting for Reuters and publications in The Economist, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Having lived, studied and worked in Sweden, Britain and France, Eva is fluent in each of those languages. Her book, Arabia Felix [Happy Arabia] in the Time of Terror – Journeys in Yemen (“Arabia Felix i Terrorns tid – Resor i Jemen” ) was published in Swedish in January 2007. It is based on her reporting for Reuters and the Economist. Three chapters translated into English by her Swedish publisher, Wahlström & Widstrand can be found here.
What has happened to discourse in the United States? Some think we never had any to speak of. There was, though, a time when Americans, some of us, did engage in thoughtful discourse and when our publications did not, as Bloom reminds us, descend to the level they reach today of spreading the propaganda of the Bush regime and trivializing and marginalizing thoughtful dissent. The corporate media have lost the ability to report truthfully and publish reasoned discourse; they must always look at the bottom line and what sells, not what serves the public interest. This was not true just a few decades ago when major organs were not owned by corporations. The Bush regime has also limited the freedom of public television and radio, driving the powerful voice of Bill Moyers, for example, off the air for a time, and effectively censoring programming, though that at least has changed a little.
The current electoral campaign is a sad example of failure of US society to think, to reason, to ask hard questions and to get detailed answers.
Human beings are the thinking animals. People are intelligent. We can change the deplorable state Bloom describes.
A few months ago in the height of the effort of the Bush regime to create fear of Iran in order to justify an attack on that country, I was part of a group standing on the street by Columbia University asking passersby if they wanted to take a little quiz. A young woman who stopped to speak with me was unable to answer correctly questions such as which one country in the middle east has refused to allow UN nuclear inspectors to work in their country. (For readers who might not know, that country is Israel, though at the time, most people said Iran. Mohammed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and his team of investigators are welcomed in Iran and doing their good work in that country. It is also true, though most Americans did not know it, that Iran does not have nuclear capacity. They cannot so much as turn on a light bulb with nuclear energy; they produce none. What they say is that they want to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.)
When she failed this quiz, the young woman, exclaimed, “I am a student at Columbia University and I don’t know things. I don’t even know how to get information.”
At least this young woman knew she didn’t know. We found that both the university students who stopped to speak with us and the neighborhood residents who did were both misinformed and eager to know.
Thank you to the WIP for being a place I can send people to discover things that the traditional media don’t publish. Even more, thank you for being an independent journal not obliged to serve interests other than the mission you have stated to guide you.
It is astonishing what has happened under this administration. Now they are reclaiming sucess in Iraq after the so called “surge”. “Mission Accomplished” again. They will take this to the convention this summer and claim they were right all along and those idiot dems didn’t know what they were talking about. Put us back in power they will proclaim! And enough of the american people will probably go along with it to keep them in power.
The media failed us in the last two elections. The lack of good intelligent journalism was shameful. The question is “why?”
I think the the kind of corporate corruption and rampant greed that erupted in the boil that was Enron has spread through the entire media industry. Nobody has any guts anymore.
Those who espouse the Prince of Peace see war as a means to their private ends. Ever since Constantine co-opted Christianity to create soldiers, the Christians have lost their way.
First, this aggression in Iraq is not a war. Iraq neither threatened nor attacked the US. This aggression in Iraq is the supreme international crime: a war of aggression, no different from Saddam’s attack on Kuwait– with less equity, because at least Saddam had some legitimate claims on Kuwait.
This aggression by the US only advances one thing: the profits of arms makers. It will not win friends. It will not help our allies, because it only makes more enemies and strengthens Al Queda. In fact, any attack on humanity is doomed to fail, because humanity is what life is all about in human society.
We in the US are now spending more on death and destruction than on life, itself. This policy benefits only those who depreciate humanity and value the death of those who stand in the way of the exploitation of the people.
Now we see the true colors of those who promise accountability and remind others of consequences. They are not accountable and no consequences apply to those who kill with impunity.
From the abolition of the Bill of Rights to the deliberate violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture and denial of the right to a fair trial– to the “rendition” of the captured to foreign countries where they may be tortured to death in secret prisons, this administration has never honored the oath by which it took office, and thus, has dishonored America and all who risk their “lives,.. their fortunes, their sacred honor”.
Finally, to reveal the true accomplishments of the Bush tenure, which has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, I quote Mark Twain’s “War Prayer”, and its profound condemnation of our Christian society.
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
The media and corporations are in it with our government. Too bad someone like John Edwards couldn’t break through. But then again since he spoke against the media, they have blackballed him.
I think the failure of the “Fourth Estate” to deliver on their obligations within our society can be traced far back into our Republic’s formation, but the nail in the coffin was definitely the 1996 Telecommunications Act that allowed for massive corporate consolidation of our mass media. At that point, “journalism” ended and “corporate-owned mass communication” became the model. Of course those media saw a better corporate return on investment from Bush/Cheney then Gore in 2000 and chose to make their vote count. After that, the media has been acting almost as a state propaganda mechanism, especially as displayed in the run-up to the Iraq War, where none of the serious (and massive) protests were given any type of positive coverage. The 24-hour news networks KNEW that war would be good for ratings, and had no interest in preventing it, while some of them had serious vested financial interests in PROMOTING it.
As for political discourse, when a Yale-educated A-student can’t explain the difference between two votes on the war, one where funding was clearly described, and the other where the funding is not spelled out, with better than “I voted for it before I voted against it” there is little hope for political speech. John Kerry was not a “flip-flopper” he was just an unexpectedly inarticulate candidate.
Or, you could go back to Michael Dukakis’ inability to articulate the difference between personal vengeance and revenge and the role of the state in Capital Punishment. The correct response to the disgusting question asked by Bernard Shaw in the second Bush/Dukakis debate should have been: “Bernard, I find your question disgusting and pathetically pandering, but here’s my answer. As her husband, I would be angry beyond words and would desire personal vengeance. I would want to kill the murderer myself. I would want to PERSONALLY rip the convicted rapists limbs from his body one at a time and THEN torture him and kill him repeatedly. That’s what I would want to do as a loving husband. AND THAT IS WHY WE HAVE LAWS IN THIS COUNTRY. Because revenge is not the answer. Capital punishment would make ME feel better in that case, but it would drag our society down. It would make The State and all of us party of a SECOND crime. So, no, I would NOT want to see an irrevocable death penalty for the killer. I WOULD, however, want to know that they would spend every single day of the rest of their lives in prison, denied personal liberty, and having to think about the crime they committed, with absolutely no chance of release or parole, no matter how much they improved themselves. I hope that answers your disgusting, pandering, and unprofessional question Bernard.”
Our politicians think we are stupid, so they treat us that way. Our media thinks of us only as consumers, and they don’t want us thinking too much.
It’s a pretty horrible state of affairs.
KILL YOUR TELEVISION.
Charlie
What a wonderful interview!
Rock on, Harry Bloom!
On please…. how good was the media at reporting the Gulf of Tonkin? How about the sinking of the USS Liberty? It’s been the same lies for 30 years. Nothing has changed, it has NOT gotten any worse on their end. The problem is quite clearly on our end. The American people have no wish to hear the truth. They want to be lied to, they want to be slaves. Anyone who still can think knows this is the truth. Those that wish to know what’s going on can do so now more than any point in all of history. We all have the power to be informed. But we choose not to be. Because its easier just to lie to ourselves and feel good. We have forgotten what it means to even be adults, and most of us are stuck in this petty naive childlike mindset. At some point you have to reach the same conclusion the elite have reached a long time ago: these people were made to be exploited.
Our journalistic establishment is a part of the greater communications industry. Since the implementation of the Reagan Revolution of movement conservatism, the political and economic trends have favored deregulation of industry and the increasing privatization of the public sphere: public lands, public education, public health, public airwaves; even our military is increasingly dependent upon private security contractors like CACI International, Custer Battles LLC, and Blackwater USA.
Through the anti-intellectual populist drumbeat from a comfortably deregulated communications media, the electorate has been warped into a market and led to believe the romantic fantasies of a nation of self-sufficient rugged individuals in a “culture war” with a “politically correct” “liberal nanny state.” As a result, the interests of private corporate shareholders have become a dangerously higher priority of government than the broader public interest. With regulatory restraints removed from our public airwaves and newsstands, there is simply less access from which to confront the conservative demagoguery regarding any other issues with effective liberal arguments in our public discourse.
Restoring media regluation — the rivival of the equal time provisions of the fairness doctrine and rolling back conglomeration of media ownership, etc. — is essential to breaking the fall of America that Prof. Bloom warns us about.
Ms Sohlman-
Thank you for a very interesting article about a fascinating and courageous individual.
Here is in the USA, the level of political and intellectual discourse has fallen to terrible lows, and I fear that only a great shock to our collective consciousness will rejuvenate our culture.
The horror of the Bush regime, coupled with the complete spinelessness of the Democratic Party as the “opposition” in name only, has sapped the strength of the public to oppose the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the erosion of civil liberties at home, and the degradation of America on the world stage.
The final blow to the psyche of the nation came not from an external belligerent nation, or from a terrorist group, but from our own government. When the Military Commissions Act passed through our rubber-stamp Congress, and was signed into law by the President, it repealed the right to a public trial, and gave the President the power to declare anyone an “enemy combatant” and detain them secretly, and indefinetly.
Democracy died that day in our nation. We go through the motions of elections, but in essence, the freedom of our citizens rests on the whim of one man, President George W Bush. His last day in office, January 20, 2009, will not come soon enough.
To the rest of the world, I, as an American citizen, take responsibility for not being able to stop the Bush regime. To the rest of the world, I apologize.
Sincerely,
Daryl Northrop
Des Moines, Iowa
USA
Member of the Green Party of the United States, November 2000 to present.
One disturbing angle to Bloom’s view is the fact that he says Pelosi, Reid & Co cannot do anything about the current situation. For a purportedly well-read man, Bloom embarrassingly ignores –or maliciously obscures, take your pick– the US Constitution’s provisions regarding separation of powers, the solitary residence of war powers within the US Congress, and the fact that the supposedly “opposition” party, the Democrats, have full control of the Congress and all its Constitutional power. What Mr Bloom is afraid to utter is obvious: that the Democrats are unwilling to do anything. It has nothing to do with their “inability” to do something. They have plenty of power, including the now-mocked-via-Kucinich’s-charade power of impeachment.
It would be wise and well to note that the Ivy League universities are a big part of the problem that Bloom laments. They have become factories of ideological warhorses and soldiers, they ply intellectually cute angles designed to justify certain ideological positions. What school produced Pere et Fils Bush? Ahhh, yes. Yale.
If you view the actions of democrats through the lense of them being the left wing of the ruling Demopublican/Republicrat party, then their actions make sense.
to Daryl Northrop —
They might make *some* sense, but I think you have to be very lenient in your use of the term “left”. It has to be divorced from all classic meaning. It has to take on brand-new meaning limited to the specific sentence in which you used it.
The Democratic Party today is well right of center. Dennis Kucinich, the “maverick rebel” himself, is right of center. In my view, only by considering totalitarian right-wing dictatorship as “center” can you find Kucinich or any other Democrat to be “left.”
What then is your defenition of Left?
Very curious to know.
To Wendigo:
I would agree with your placement of the Democratic Party as a right-wing party.
All the best!
DN
I am just so frustrated with this administration, this president, and our congressional leader… and much of the country. No one want to face the facts of what we have done and where it is leading us. I have written letters to my congress members, local and state members as well phone calls, and any thing else I can do to make a difference… I don’t know what to do any more to help!
I do want to say a big THANKS to Mr. Bloom for his insight and courage.
I believe corporations should not own the Media.
A few quotes that relate to the problems of media, the individual
citizen, where we are headed…
and what each of us can do.
So we have the mainstream corporate news fakers of the “military-industrial-[media] complex” —
(Remember, President Eisenhower warned us of this unholy alliance in his last speech to the American People in 1961 wherein he added
…The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Today, are we taking everything for ‘granted’? Especially with the corporate news fakers publishing the state lies…
and arousing ‘1984’ fears of the never-ending war in ‘Oceania’…
as alway, to control and direct the citizens to not think and go back to sleep–watching your sports, soaps, and dramas on the corporate media TV’s so-called “reality” programs–the matrix-fantasy world of lies masquerading as truth.
“The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.”
–Joseph M. Goebbels
“When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket, and then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter. Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?
Watch Money. Money is a barometer of a society’s virtue.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion —
when you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors —
when you see men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you —
when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that our society is doomed.
Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection, and the base of a moral existence.”
— Ayn Rand
We are the ones, each and every one of us, need to take responsibility for the reality we find ourselves in today.
And that means we have to be willing to think and speak the truth about the absurdities we are being asked to believe by the state and the corporate media.
And if we believe these promulgated “state” absurdities we will find what Voltaire says in the next quote to be true for us…
“Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”
– Voltaire
Harry Bloom has done and is still doing just that–speaking
the truth, uncovering the lies…as this interview so aptly demonstrates. We must do the same.
So, why do most people avoid the truth (other than from
laziness mixed with ostrich-like fear of reality?
Well…
“People avoid the truth because then they would have to take responsibility.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwight and critic, 1856-1950
So here we are in the twilight zone in more ways than one…
and it is way past sunset…
“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances,there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, least we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
–Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court
So…
“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”
–Thomas Paine
“How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.”
–Adolph Hitler, Chancellor of Germany 1933-1945
Don’t give up thinking and telling the truth to all you meet whenever and wherever you can.
Be courageous–seek and speak the Truth.
Eva,
Bloom may have given up on how America can get back on the right track. But there is a new track being built, as reflected in the agenda of the newly emerging American Revolutionary Party. See http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us. Any thoughts?
Although not opposed to new literary and artistic experiments (in fact, I consider myself a defender of new ideas of discernable value), in some respect I am still an artistic and intellectual “purist” somewhat in the mold of Harold Bloom.
Therefore, having come across his trenchant criticism of Harry Potter and similar “mass-production” and “mass consumption” commodities, I am much more inclined to agree with him. It would be hard to argue with his literary credentials, at least in terms of the “Western Canon.” I was a little disappointed by his somewhat dismissive approach to Eastern literature (he describes the Bhagavadgita as “intriguing,” but then confesses that he does not understand it). For a truly well-read scholar, it is more than disappointing that he seems incapable of sensing the universal and enduring value of human creativity. A great literary mind, in my view, would instantly connect with great ideas and concepts arising from the human mind- regardless of the language or culture of origin. After all, this is what enabled a very young Pablo Neruda to draw inspiration from Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener, prompting him to translate Tumi Sandhyara Meghamala into Spanish. The same might be said of such stalwarts as Thoreau and Emerson (whom Prof. Bloom clearly admires), who were in fact deeply moved by Hindu sacred writings (I would merely recommend a reading of Thoreau’s Walden to derive a sense of his appreciation of the intellectual capacity of India’s ancient Rishis).
Where I particularly agree with Prof. Bloom in the arena of current children’s literature is the proliferation of bulky tomes in a seemingly endless series of manufactured fiction. This tendency simply reminds me of the highly questionable “sequel” phenomenon in motion pictures, usually aimed simply at boosting the profits and the cash register receipts of the studios and the distributors. It is indeed true that quality of a creative work ought not, in fact, ought NEVER, to be judged by measures of popularity. Throughout history, popularity has been a passing phenomenon- good for a sort of temporary stardom. The great 19th century Bengali novelist/thinker, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, once advised a young correspondent who wanted to know how, and why, one must write. In effect, Bankim advised his inquirer that writing was a pursuit, ultimately, of beauty. All writing, in his opinion, ought to be aimed at creating something beautiful. IN THIS, ACCORDING TO BANKIM, THERE SHOULD BE NO COMPROMISE. What is beautiful, Bankim argues, is also what is perennial, i.e., transcends time. By all means, Bankim exhorted, write, BUT ONLY IF YOU CAN CREATE BEAUTY that has transcendent value.
This is truly a prolifically commercial age, with seemingly great breadth of available commodities, including commodities of learning, but sadly little depth. The Stephen King and J.K. Rowling phenomena illustrate, if nothing else, the value of finding the right product to sell, a la Bill Gates and other technological mavericks of our time. In India, we always identified the “East India Company” as the standard-bearer of Western trade and merchandising. Two centuries later, that salesmanship is not only alive and well, but has now penetrated just about all privately valued precincts of the sacred for human beings- literature, philosophy, ethics, morality, creativity, and questions of existence.
It is also deeply ironic to me that Prof. Bloom graces the campus of Yale (although I understand he also has affiliation with NYU)- the same place that has yielded, in non-negligible numbers, such human abominations as the current occupant of the White House, and a large retinue of mental and ethical pygmies- all, in a grander sense, salesmen (and women- let us not forget the likes of Ann Coulter) in the same mold as the “prolific” writers being discussed here. As many will agree, the public spectacle of lying, cheating, hypocrisy, cruelty, and limitless hatred exhibited by the likes of Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, Kristol, Cheney, and the entire lot of shameless peddlers of mayhem, and to only a lesser degree, Clinton, Pelosi, Feinstein (not to mention the utterly repulsive Lieberman) and the vast majority of the beltway corporate club- these only should cause any decent human being hoping for civilization to be somehow redeemed from the clutches of vice and degeneration we see today, to wish for SOMETHING ON THE LEVEL OF A MASSIVE REVOLUTION in order the secure the future of humanity.
To witness how a Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Ron Paul or a Ralph Nader are all systematically marginalized in the sorry exercise of public debate and the pathetic electoral farce in this country, is to realize the absolute hopelessness of any redemption for this caricature of democracy, or the rule of law, or even basic human decency and values.
If we leave aside a few anachronisms such as Harold Bloom, I have little doubt that the oft-deified “Ivy League” and similar institutions are well-stocked with narrow-minded bigots, slaves to money and power, and empty-headed sycophants. The Columbia President incident was not an isolated event.
I think the story is shifting rapidly here. I think that we’re heading for a steep slide. European and Asian markets got clobbered again today so tomorrow……….
The whole “affluence” here avoided the huge income inequity with a gigantic housing bubble. Low interest rates and fake mortgages created artificial buying power than is in complete collapse now.
Did you notice that the price of wheat is up 50% in the last few months? I’m guessing that China will also take a hit when Americans can’t redecorate their houses with 60″ TV screens.
“Through the anti-intellectual populist drumbeat from a comfortably deregulated communications media, the electorate has been warped into a market and led to believe the romantic fantasies of a nation of self-sufficient rugged individuals in a “culture war” with a “politically correct” “liberal nanny state.” ”
I have heard this argument many times, and I’m not convinced by it (with all due respect to Charlie Levenson and BD). To blame anti-intellectualism on deregulated markets or on Ronald Reagan is a touch too simple, in my view. It’s not wrong, but it’s an incomplete understanding.
After all, how did Reagan get elected in the first place? He conformed to a particular “image” in the public mind about what a leader should look like and behave like. He represented a cartoon, one-dimensional, corny Hollywood melodrama notion of what “virtue” and “leadership” looked like. Similarly, why did Americans vote for Dubya? Because of his “down home, aw shucks, just regular folks” public persona. Rationally, everyone knew Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and has always been handed everything on a platter and always had no leadership qualifications whatsoever. But at the same time, the current president resembles, in his public manner, the “good guy” in a typical Hollywood movie.
Another way of saying this is that Bloom is right: aesthetics do matter. It IS crucial to value great art, because great art avoids the misleading, distorting cliches that kitsch and schlock embraces. Fake insights, corny cliches, and banal pseudo-insights are the province of most big-budget Hollywood movies and popular bestsellers. A steady diet of such “art” leads, over time, to the corrosion of the mind. Before long, people start to attribute to fools and psychopaths like Bush and Reagan a nobility of soul they don’t actually possess. Because in cliche-filled pulp novels and banal blockbuster movies, the Reagan and Bush “types” of characters ARE virtuous and ARE noble and ARE almost always the “good guys”. Whereas more complicated, aloof, moody and broody types (like Harold Bloom) are usually NOT depicted as “noble souls” or “heroes” but simply as “weirdos” and “freaks” and “cowards,” if not outright villains.
Thus, intellectuals and non-conformists, over time, come to be marginalized and cease to have any role whatsoever in public life. Someone like Abraham Lincoln could never, **ever** run successfully for public office in the age of mass market entertainment and Hollywood kitsch. He was just too “broody” and “gloomy” and “anti-social” and “weird”. He did not resemble in any way, shape, or form, the heroes of kitsch fiction. Kitsch and fake art have helped destroy democracy. But most people overlook this important fact. They don’t take aesthetics seriously. They don’t see what the big deal is. And yet, every political catastrophe throughout history has its origins in kitsch and crude, simplistic art. Nazism and the Holocaust are incomprehensible unless you realize how much of it was motivated by simple-minded, corny fantasies of blood purity and pristineness.
Whereas real art, great literature does the opposite. It revels in the complexities and thorny contradictions and IMpurities and PARADOXES of life. Hamlet is the anthesis of Tom Cruise’s character “Maverick” in TOP GUN. Not to recognize the harm done by kitsch is to fail to appreciate how central the questions of aesthetics are to every other area of human thought. Any culture that celebrates bad art and ignores great art is doomed, sooner or later, to collapse. Art is one of the crucial and essential tools for keeping open the possibilities of liberty, freedom, fulfillment, and love.
what we are seeing is the selling of the fall of the united states to a new class delineation. for some reason the best in america is being masqueraded as fall guys. and no one is interested. do you realize that smug grin is your own genocide of just crass egos and the blame of heredity is rancid. others, please