Crotchety ol’ Robert Bork is hopping mad about American cultural exports, and he’s arm in arm with the mullahs and censors:
… Mr. Bork, author of “Slouching Towards Gomorrah,” thinks some conservative (not to say radical) Muslims have a legitimate point ? as do American evangelicals and others on the religious right.
“They have good reason to be very worried about” the spread of American movies, music and fashion, Mr. Bork allows. “I suppose it’s better than what they have now, but I wouldn’t celebrate too much if they began to adopt our popular culture.”
But the simplest critique is the American. Take me, for instance. I’m an American, and I’m apparently not very Americanized. I don’t listen to popular music, wear trendy clothes, or rush out to see Hollywood films. That’s not a point of pride, either. It’s a matter of taste. There’s no homogeneity among the Americans I know. In film, for example, nothing is more American than the work of John Cassavetes, but the critics will fail to see that because they mistake commercialism (which can occur anywhere) for character.
The underlying message is that people who ‘succumb’ to ‘American’ commercialism must be protected by those who know better, and must be herded into inherited pens like sheep. The real critique is one made by Jose Ortega Y Gasset years ago: the ascent of the masses. Whether a valid critique or not, I’ll leave that to you to decide. But one thing is clear, and that is that current critics mistake commercialism for national identity and have staked out a false heart for their monster.
Reason editor Charles Paul Freund has a nice take, though, noting that ‘Americanization’ is most prevalent where native culture is stifled by oppressive controls:
Mr. Freund offers an inspiring anecdote. In Talibanized Afghanistan, in 1997, all aspects of culture ? movies, music, photographs, art ? were strictly forbidden. Yet smuggled copies of “Titanic” (which many an American pastor preached against) found their way into Afghan homes.
The movie was so popular that young men in the capital of Kabul wanted their hair cut in the style of star Leonardo DiCaprio. At weddings, cakes were shaped like the Titanic.
It seems as if pieces of “Titanic,” so to speak, are tastiest where local cultural cuisines don’t nourish.
At any rate, today is evidence that Philadelphia (America’s birthplace) has retained its cultural identity.
Comments
14 responses to “Team America vs. the World (and Robert Bork)”
Nice post Dennis, and THANK YOU! I’m off to see the Mummers.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Happy New Year!
Ok..I went and read the link…did I miss where Bork was aggitating for legislation to control American culture?
Are we back to the strange, and actually free-speech stifling, coalescence of the legal and the moral?
Bork may indeed be a curmudegeony prude. There’s a world of difference between offering a critique of baggy-pants or bare midriffs and tossing people in jail or flogging them for the offense (as Islamists would do).
There’s a lot I love about American culture..and it is truly a democratic culture because it is freely adopted and isn’t topdown imposed (which may be why it engenders such contempt in salons from the Upper Westside to Paris); however, I think I should be free to criticize its negative portions without drawing the charge I’m a fascist of one kind or another.
“An artist who needs government subsidies is a whore — an incompetent one.” Robert A. Heinlein.
And that’s my view on art and culture. If it is not what people want to see/hear/read, it’s not art and not culture, either — it’s an imposition on their free time and another way of making them feel guilt and shame.
P.
Whom did I call a fascist?
And when did I say that Bork proposed legislation? I’m as free to poke at Bork as he is to shake his fist.
That said, whch portions of ‘American’ culture are negative, and what makes them inherently ‘American’?
That’s closer to the root of this post.
To Eric, Justin Case, Dennis, Darleen, Portia, Professor Nick Packwood, Persnickety, Ironbear, and everyone else who reads Classical Values: Happy New Year!
I’m an elitist and feel free to criticize popular as well as elite culture in accordance with my values, but I will not advocate any legislation or subsidies in that area.
I regard Robert Bork as the closest real-life equivalent to Ellsworth M. Toohey* that I have yet seen. He is my arch-enemy, and I am his. As to American popular culture, it reminds me of Gail Wynand’s “Banner”*. I prefer Howard Roark*, architect. I identify with Dominique*.
*Characters in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, about which I think a great deal.
It seems I’m woefully behind the times — I’ve never read anything by Ayn Rand.
When I was younger my cousin got into her through the band Rush (which made me leery), and later in college she was occasionally mentioned by angry professors in tones generally reserved for pedophiles and Nazis.
What am I missing?
Dennis
You did not call me a fascist; however, when you start off stating Bork is “arm in arm with the mullahs and censors” you are calling him a fascist (someone who wishes the state, through legislation, to control culture among other activities). Certainly you are free to poke at Bork. But lumping him in with Islamofascists is redolent of old-fashioned red-baiting of decades long past. Pokes should remain within Marquis of Queensbury rules.
😉
I would say that portion of American culture that celebrates gangbangers is negative.
Steven
Happy New Years back at ya!
Hmmm… somehow I don’t think Bork has the social cache to be a Toohey. Dominque has her own issues, I most admire Dagney Taggert (though I would have stuck with Hank Rearden … Galt just isn’t as full a character and I just couldn’t see how Dagney fell for him. Maybe the plane crash addled her a bit).
Dennis
Rand still annoys the crappola out of leftists. An unapologetic capitalist, an athiest Russian Jew, who escaped Stalin and wrote a few novels in the 50’s (and then wrote a great deal of non-fiction) in the grand romantic tradition while dealing in themes that were/are considered by the Left as anathema to their world view, they hate Rand with the passion they hate GW. Most of the attacks on her are purely ad homenim and rarely deal with her ideas.
Reminds me of how the Left reacts to Robert Heinlein, too.
Darleen,
I think you’re making a bit of a leap. I’ve already treated the fallacious reductio ad Hitlerum elsewhere, and I don’t believe I’m guilty of it here.
But for the record, Bork believes that judicial activism protects ‘evils’ like indecency, abortion, and homosexuality. He favors a constitutional amendment defining marriage which seems in part aimed at removing the ‘right to homosexual sodomy.’
And he doesn’t stop there:
You’re welcome to call him fascist. I’m just thankful he never made it to the supreme court.
Relax, everyone. Bork is the moral equivalent of Thurgood Marshall.
http://www.claremont.org/writings/980212jaffa.html
Dennis
I haven’t read “Slouching” and if, indeed, Bork is calling for legislative censorship, then I would definitely deem it fascism.
I can sum up my approach to the subject thusly … “All law should serve the moral good, but not all morality is the province of the law.”
Bork is indeed “arm in arm with the mullahs and censors” (not to mention the neo-Cromwellian Western left) at least to the extent that he is supporting their policy of scapegoating foreign infidels for homegrown problems they can’t (or won’t) face themselves, and echoing their resentment of a culture that offers more freedom and prosperity than the mullahs and censors will ever provide their own people.
‘Fascist’ is an overused epithet, so I’ll just call Bork a blind raving idiot.
Oops, I almost forgot: Happy New Year!
I’ll just call Bork what he is: a collectivist.