Unbought Stuffed Dogs

I don’t go into book stores very often, and the reason that I don’t is that I invariably gravitate towards the New Literature table, and then I find things on it that leave me unsettled for, literally, weeks. A few years ago it was my belated discovery that Chick Lit was considered Actual Lit, a fact which still haunts my mentally vacant moments and sometimes fills me with wrath at inopportune times (at parties, for example, making me an Instant Bore).

Last week I went in, and found the inevitable: the reaction to Chick Lit’s huge popularity, and its diametrical opposite. Yes, dear reader, Literature for the Average American Male. It’s as if Chuck Palahniuk reproduced by budding, but with each separate bud a little of his talent ebbed away, and what we’re left with are major publishing houses infested with mediocre men who want to write about, celebrate, and justify their mediocrity.

Now, listen. I am all for mediocrity. I personify it in most of my daily behaviors. I do everything half-assed, except eat, and what I eat is usually not good for me, so that evens out. I temper my super-human consumption of water (yes! I get my eight glasses a day!) with an at times equally astounding consumption of caffeine and alcohol. I procrastinate. I have a tiny little fat roll on my belly. I snore. I live off my husband. So heaven help me, no, I have nothing, nothing at all, against mediocrity. By definition it afflicts most of us, after all.

However, I do sort of strive against it. You will notice that you never, never get a blog post from me saying, “Today was a wonderful day. I sat around in my underwear, watched the entire fifth season of The Sopranos and single-handedly kept Budweiser in business today.” No; you’ll get an entry describing the exact same activities (except for the Budweiser; ugh) larded with horror and guilt. But these books all appear to be doing just that, with the additional joy of “and then my stupid bitch of a girlfriend tried to get me off the couch. Jeez. What a buzzkill. And I have to fucking rent a tux for our fucking wedding. Dang. I wonder if her mom ever blows her dad anymore?” The last line? Actual quote.

Which brings me to what disturbs me. It is this: Women are not allowed to be mediocre. We have been complaining about this for ages, of course, ever since we were suddenly expected to be brilliant career women, stellar mothers and devoted housewives all at once. But I am complaining about it on a much more mediocre level.

Look at sitcoms and movies that are supposedly made for women and center on romance. The heroine is “just like you and me” usually because she is clumsy. The classic signifier for “normal girl” is “trips on her Fendi heel and falls spectacularly in the middle of Fifth Avenue.” If they’re going for the down home vibe, it’s “slips on a water spill at the diner and falls into the lap of her future love interest.” But she’s always cute, “smart”– whatever they want to make pass for smart; usually they have her friend tell her that she is, or, better, her love interest when he confesses his undying devotion, and that establishes it– and, if overweight, she is “Bridget Jones” overweight. In other words, the actress, who was thirty pounds underweight to begin with, “packed on” twenty pounds for the role and ended up looking like a slightly-thinner-than-average woman, which is the universal signifier for “fat.” If you doubt this, I suggest that you read the book “Bridget Jones’ Diary” in which she begins every entry with a measurement of her thighs. Her thighs, in her most despairingly “fat” entry, were eighteen inches. Mine are twenty two– or they were back then, when I was thin. (I measured after reading, and despaired for twenty hours until I realized that it was stupid to do so). Whereas mediocre men on TV are truly mediocre– look at any male character in a sitcom, with very few exceptions.

I want a movie or a novel that does for women what “High Fidelity” did for men. That was a wonderful story about mediocrity. Curiously enough, “The Truth About Cats and Dogs” comes close for women, sappy treacle-pot though it is; but even then, Janeane Garofalo’s character had some extraordinary talent or other. She had to, or she wouldn’t be worth loving, you see. There it is again.

I suppose all I’m asking for is some sort of recognition that if the main character on “King of Queens” is lovable, then so is the housewife from Iowa who weighs too much, reads “Reader’s Digest” and quilts in her spare time. Oh, I mean, society has a niche for her– she’s a lovable mom; but I would like there to be some sort of room for her to be a lovable person. I would like there to be some sort of admission that the girl with acne who gets straight C’s and works as a bagger in the grocery store might, you know, value and enjoy her own life, and that somebody might at some point fall in love with her, even though she isn’t hot or brilliant. Stories could be written about these people, good stories, and they probably have been, but nobody sees them outside of a specialised circle. Movies certainly won’t be made of them, which I accept as a reality of the marketplace.

I suppose what disturbs me, finally, is that everywhere I go, I get this feeling that unless I am either beautiful or a neurobiologist or a, a, a published poet or something, I am not worth loving. I realize that there is a large disconnect here between reality (in particular, the fact that I am loved) and the feeling I get. But there it is. I don’t think that men get this pressure in the same way. Now, there are about a million social pressures that men do deal with, most of them similar to ours– but they do, societally speaking, always have the sweet haven of mediocrity to fall back to. How this bears out in the lives of individual men, I have no idea– nobody wants to be mediocre, for Christ’s sake– but every single medium in our society broadcasts the message that mediocrity for men is lovable. Goofy guys in commercials. Fat, lazy, beloved husbands on sitcoms. Country songs about not bein’ no eggheaded intellectual, but still havin’ a good time. (Contrast this with the female version of the country pride song, the execrable “Redneck Woman.” It contains lines like “don’t need no fancy drawers to make my man want me,” which, you’ll be startled to realize, is meant to convey that she is irresistibly sexy, even “with a baby on her hip.”). On and on goes the list of acceptable forms of mediocrity for men, and now we have a whole table of shitty books celebrating it in mediocre prose.

Astute followers of culture will observe the following counter-argument: The main characters in Chick Lit novels are blindingly mediocre. They are bland, shopping-obsessed, and while swearing that they don’t need a man, spend three hundred pages in quest of a man. To these people I say, yes. Yes, dear God, they are mediocre as hell– but they don’t know it. The mediocre women who write this crap genuinely believe that they are creating a lovable heroine with a lot to offer, who personifies modern womanhood with her savvy, witty remarks (usually in all caps for emphasis!) and, you know, she lives on her own and has, like, a job and stuff. Usually she is the top editor at a high-powered fashion magazine, or something. A screen-writer, a spunky dog-groomer if the author is trying to make her heroine Independent by making her An Animal Lover Who Is Not Afraid to Break a Nail, or a secretary with dreams of stardom in her music career (generally achieved by the end of the novel). Never, never, never is she a bagger at a grocery store.

A couple of authors have created delightfully mediocre female characters. Lorrie Moore is a particular favorite of mine, as is Francine Prose. The beauty of these authors is that their characters are not specifically female. And this, ultimately, is all I ask for. I do not think of myself as a woman, strange though it may sound after an entry dedicated to the various ways in which I, as a woman, feel oppressed. But this is exactly the problem. In my head, I think of myself only as “you” or, on bad days, “you asshole,” and then I walk out the door and realize, Oh, god dammit, I’m female. That’s right. And suddenly there is a whole set of metrics of which I fall short.

Anyway. I haven’t got a pithy ending for this, except to remark that if anybody has any reading suggestions, I’d enjoy them.

Periodically, I indulge in some country music. I used to do it because I was more or less unhappy, and the songwriters of the genre properly belonging to my particular social milieu don’t really get down in the mud and wallow the way you sometimes wish they would. I am operating on the assumption that indie singer-songwriters are the griots of my particular tribe (never mind the fact that I don’t like most of them), but they’re no good for generalized misery, because they sit around trying to crawl out of gloom by building ladders constructed mostly of irony, which turns out to be a delicate substance. Ladders of irony tend to shatter when you’re halfway up them, and then– ah, crowning irony– you find yourself dumped right back in the bottom of your pit, rubbing your eyes, just where you started. It’s only right, I suppose.

Almost every other social group has better wallowing music than the liberal-arts educated urban young– except, perhaps, for the uppermost classes, exemplified for me by one Petronella Wyatt, a UK Daily Mail columnist, daughter of an MP, who was dispatched to report on a muddy British version of Woodstock, and remarked with a fleer and a toss of her narrow nose that really, she preferred Opera and Concerti, and, having seen Modest Mouse play, “concluded that they had much to be modest about.” (Why they sent her to cover Glastonbury is a mystery as yet unsolved).

This makes sense, if you look at it through the class-conscious lens that is beginning to characterize this blog.  We consider ourselves sophisticated; our particular brand of sophistication is what marks us out from other groups who are equally affluent and probably as well educated, but who perhaps vote Republican or are content to live in the suburbs. Our sophistication is a mark of our deep unease, I think, just as the Victorians became extremely concerned with morality and domesticity to mask their fear of falling back into the laboring muck from which they had so recently risen.

Unlike the Victorians, we, the Liberal-Arts-Educated Urban Young, are blessed with a highly developed meta-sense. (Forgive me for constantly talking about “we” as if I knew, by the way. I’m guessing, and I mostly mean “me” but these observations also arise from talking to people and reading things, so I’m going to go ahead and use “we” and if you hate me for it, I’m very sorry).  We have the Victorian sense of insecurity that comes from not actually producing anything, specifically with our hands; what we lack is the Victorian faith– the belief in a just and moral God which allowed them to construct a new mental and social world in which they, the brand new middle class, were the apex of creation.

The Christian Right is correct: a modern university education does take away your faith. You can emerge with both a four-year degree and a belief in God, but if you come out of a fancy Eastern college (or an urban state university, in my case) with a degree in the Humanities, your odds aren’t good– and if you do believe in God, it’s probably in a sort of nebulous, Bible-as-suggestions sort of way. Chances are that your faith is much more firmly rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Origin of the Species. But even then, you learned the gray areas; you learned that the writers of the Declaration held slaves, and that Darwinism led both to theories of eugenics and to the worst social excesses of the late nineteenth century.  In other words, you learned that the world is often horrifying and that the minute you start believing in something, it shifts under your feet. You learned that there is much good in the world, but at the same time you learned that you couldn’t necessarily trust it. (I was a history major. What did you learn? It was probably different.)

So our sophistication, what sets us apart from other groups and shields us and forms a little insulating coccoon, is based in irony and sometimes cynicism. We can’t be fooled, not even by ourselves (you see? I can’t even describe our penchant for irony without employing irony. I am about to disappear inside a whirling inward spiral).  This is why we make terrible wallowing music; in order to wallow, you must unabashedly feel, and we don’t really like to do that. If we do it, we’re certainly not going to tell you. But we’re also a class that indulges in therapy of various sorts, and nothing is more therapeutic than telling other people your troubles; and it turns out that people love to hear about the dramatic misery of others. Appearing intelligent is, however, the most important thing; and so our music discusses our feelings with supreme ironic detachment, which still allows the cheap thrill of listening to somebody else’s gossip.

Almost no other social group, as I say, does this. The upper class, exemplified by the glorious Petronella Wyatt, is too well cushioned on nearly every side to feel any insecurity; those who cling resolutely to the concept of High Culture, as she seems to, may like it because it provides an opportunity to express feeling without being vulgar (by, for example, expressing your own feelings). The feelings expressed by classical music are generalized and impressionistic; feelings expressed in opera are fictional, and therefore not intrusive.

When you get into the music of the People– any People– Irish, Chilean, Mexican, American– what you get is music for people who spend their days physically creating things, for the most part, whose place in the world, and whose right to existence, is recognized by every force in society, because blue-collar people are a huge voting and marketing demographic. Therefore, the insecurities expressed in these songs are not of a nebulous nature, but the physical insecurities of mortgages, taxes, heartbreak, crop failure, divorce, prison, and– most interesting to me– a loss of faith in one’s own entry into heaven, which is in no way to be confused with a loss of faith in God.

The country I listen to now is simply left over from my earlier period of gloom, and so when I listen to it it’s only because my music is on “random.” So it’s pure anthropology. What I like best about it, now, is the wonderful myth that they work so hard and carefully to craft. It’s very interesting to see who country listeners think they are.  The mainstream ClearChannel listeners are, obviously, patriotic. The men are hard-working, tough, savvy but not overly educated (smart enough to be manly, thanks, and no smarter); they drink beer, or Jack Daniels– often to excess. However, if you walk into a bar and demand a drink from the bartender, chances are good that you’ll be poured a glass of coffee or milk instead, and be given a life-lesson; because the bartender is older and wiser than you are, and his job in a country song, curiously enough,  is to tell you that alcohol is not the answer. Wives are wonderful helpmeets, and insufferable ball-and-chains, who, though you hate them, break your heart and take everything you have when they divorce you, and you never recover from their deaths. All women worth your while wear boots and jeans, and also fresh breezy calico dresses. They dance the two-step, spit watermelon seeds, perch atop your tractor, and bring you lunch. Also, they are hot, wild vixens in the sack. While being demure, blonde and Christian. And mothers.

Also, God is a loving father who is watching over you, and is probably not going to let you into heaven, although he did let your mother in, because she’s watching you from up there and by the way that rain is her tears. If you are married, you married the little girl that you passed notes to in first grade, and then met by the old oak tree somewhere in Georgia, when you were not occupied in stacking beer cans by a quaintly-named river in the sultry Southern nights, or drinking strawberry wine and screwing in the cornfields, which is an experience that you never forgot, though you moved on.

If you are a man, you probably spent some time in prison, although it wasn’t your fault, and if it was your fault, he had it coming anyway, and it’s only because the government doesn’t understand, because while you are patriotic and support your government in all things, you also hate and fear it. It is good to support troops, but not good to pay the taxes needed to raise the money to support them. Moral support will do. The flag is very important and you should not burn it, because it upsets Jesus. You think I am joking. I am not joking.

All things may be redeemed by the love of a good woman, defined as a woman who doesn’t mind that you keep cheating on her, but will stick around as long as is needed for you to reform, which you eventually will do, with the help of God and throwing away the bottle. Working in factories is hard, and is the only honest way to make a living, as is farming. You drive a John Deere, and a Mustang, and a truck. A big truck.

If you are a woman, you are hot, wild, crazy, independent, Christian, in love with your husband, neglected, spunky, and care what nobody thinks of you. Because you are hot and spunky. Hot. By the way. Though you don’t need fancy city underwear to be hot, because your country goodness does all the talking.

It’s all quite heady, especially when you drive through the South and look at the people who think they are the people described above. Especially the ones without many teeth. The above observations apply only to mainstream modern country, by the way. Older country is venerated in songs, but never played. That way of life, apparently, has passed completely, and is deeply lamented (like the cowboy life– a subgenre I did not get into). Because while country people are awesome and set themselves apart by their earthy awesomeness, they are also modern, hip and sophisticated. They would just like you to know. You think you’re the only sophisticated one? Yeah? Well, my woman drinks Chablis! Suck it!

To the enduring shame of English departments everywhere, there is a raging debate going on (quietly and insignificantly, which is how all of our debates rage) about who can read what. For example, I, as a soul-searching white middle class female, must ask myself: Can I ever really read Toni Morrison? Can I, from my privileged paradigm, ever truly comprehend the beauty and wonder that is Black Femaleness? Can I, with my modified Colonial Gaze– even young, white liberals have it now, you’ll be pleased to know; this has been pointed out to us by angry academics of color who were tired of us feeling that we understood them when we never will– ever really enter into the true experience of reading, which is the dialectical interchange between text and reader, if you will? The answer, you’ll all be pleased to know, is apparently a resounding No. No, I cannot, because I am apparently doomed to suffer the literary equivalent of the rich man trying to get into heaven. I may look at it from the outside, I may press my nose yearningly to the glass that separates me forever from Authentic Experience, but that is as far as I can go.

Honestly, I don’t completely disagree. I think it’s safe to say that for me, reading about the pain of slavery or the difficulty of being respected in a segregated Northern city, or anything else, will be an interesting academic exercise in curiosity. I do not demand entry into the experience for myself. Christ, why would I? I even spent three feverish weeks writing a paper on the limits of experience in response to a putrid book called “On the Rez,” in which Ian Frazier completely failed to recognize that, as a white man, he will never actually be an Oglala Sioux. (If you want to read that paper, which I rather think you don’t, it’s here).

But here’s the trouble with authenticity: If you’re going to truly be a stickler about it, you’ll discover that very few people actually have it. For example, Toni Morrison, though apparently descended from slaves, was not in fact a slave herself; therefore, Beloved is not technically being written from a standpoint of authenticity. The same would be true of me if I attempted to claim my authentic right to write about the experiences of my relatives who were kicked out of the Ukraine for being Jewish. Yes, their blood runs in my veins; yes, perhaps I’ve done my research, and been raised with family stories, and hell, I even have my grandfather’s exact facial features– but set up my authenticity as I will, nothing will replace the fact that it isn’t my personal story, and that therefore I have no right to it.

Well. If you’re going to look at literature like that, you say, why write books at all? And I quite agree. The trouble here is obviously the English profession’s new sense of what books are actually for. Books, you see, are not for entertainment. You do not read to enjoy yourself or escape or whatever your second grade teacher told you the joy of reading was. You do not read to find out about other cultures or points of view– oh God, you really don’t do that, because, as mentioned, you as a reader can never know, so why bother? No. You read in order that you may right the wrongs of the world, and that is why authenticity is so crucial; the wrongs cannot be righted until literature has been purified, and all impure literature has been held up for ridicule. Not burned– no; we’re not Nazis, we’re not Stalinists– but roundly discredited, exposed as the viper’s nest of Wrong Thought that it truly is.

This is too bad, on many levels, some more obvious than others. The obvious levels I will not go into (I find they are all encapsulated, more or less, in the phrase, “But I like Barbara Kingsolver”). I would, however, like to consider the dilemma in which this draconian position lands its own proponents. Once you start in on the Authenticity question, you are left with one of two positions. One, only Frederick Douglass’s personal slavery narrative, and things like it, can be considered “authentic.” This extends to other genres as well; for example, only Elie Wiesel’s “Night” can be considered an authentic depiction of life in the concentration camps, and so forth. Doing this, you narrow your canon considerably, and you also disenfranchise your favorites. Everything else you can still teach, as long as you teach it as a cautionary example of what not to think, and lead your students to the conclusion that the past was inhabited by two strata of society– the Oppressors, who wrote all of the literature, and the Oppressed, who were good and pure without exception (although recent scholars have come to the conclusion that even among the Oppressed there were levels of oppression, which leads us inevitably to the conclusion that only women– no, only poor women– no, only poor Scottish women– no, only– etc.– are good and pure people).

Option two– the one they’ve gone with, apparently– is that you simply toss aside the question of authenticity for certain groups. This means that you can continue to teach, for example, Toni Morrison, although you probably still need to teach Beloved in terms of what it can tell you about the modern black female consciousness. White men are, of course, right out, unless they’re gay; but if they’re gay, they have to be a particular kind of gay– not even Hanif Kureishi, a bisexual Anglo-Pakistani, has escaped criticism, for example; you really want the Act Up kind of gay man, interested in Modern Queer Street Theater. Even men of color have not been so lucky. Die-hard po-cos won’t teach Naipaul or Rushdie (they both have bad thoughts, and anyway, even though their skins are a light shade of brown, their souls are white, and make no mistake, English these days is most certainly in the business of judging souls). White women are okay, although it’s really best, if they must be white, if they’ve been visibly oppressed in some way, because if there’s one sign of progress it’s that white women are as morally suspect as white men now (hooray! We’ve arrived!).

And so on. What’s depressing about this is that, in the right hands, authenticity can be an interesting question. It’s a worthwhile pursuit to spend some time thinking about knowledge, about what your own culture allows you to understand and to know. I really don’t think that I can ever properly know certain other cultures– although I tend to believe that the breakdown is on class lines, rather than language, racial or gender barriers. (Part of what makes the middle class so interesting is a certain basic homogeneity which appears to transcend national boundaries). What nobody tends to discuss is that, just as I’ll never be able to understand the experiences of a sharecropping black family, I am just as unlikely to ever fully enter into the world of a family of Bible-thumping truck drivers. But that, you see, is generally considered a virtue.

I actually started this because I was all fired up about the perceived authenticity that a knowledge of Spanish gives to the white middle class. Even the literary moral arbiters visibly soften around the edges when someone displays some solidarity with the people of Guatemala, by, for example, labelling the fork box in a coffee shop “tenedores.” Multiculturalism! Wow! And suddenly the whole prickly question of authenticity flies right out the door, to be replaced by slavering enthusiasm for transcending cultural boundaries through the miracle of a shared language. But that’s for another time; my bile runs low and I am exhausted by indignation.

I posted a couple of short stories just now. If you feel like reading them, they’re over to the right there, poorly organized under the “short stories and fiction” page and highly visible, but here are some links to them anyway even though you could just click over, because I just learned how to do html links and I’m still enjoying it:

The Savior of Milton Falls

Long Term Yields

Drama

Wedding Plans

The Fowlers

They’re all stories I wrote for my recent Creative Writing class at UT, but I kind of enjoyed writing them.

The bourgeoisie are an interesting class, I think. As a member of the bourgeoisie myself, I spend a lot of time in the sort of useless soul-searching in which one indulges with the aid of a few martinis. Perhaps you know the thoughts: My goodness, you think, I certainly live a privileged life. Here I am, you think, spending my cash idly on an unmitigated luxury good, while impoverished people [live in toilets in Mauritania/ starve on the streets of Harare/ are unemployed in Flint, MI/ have no health care in Calcutta]. And yet, you think, I do not want to be a bad person; I heartily wish that people were not starving on their food stamp allowance, and if anybody gave me a way to fix it for them at a low cost to myself (I become brutally honest after four martinis), why, I’d jump at it. In the meantime, the world has martinis in it, and what a shame for nobody to enjoy them. And you order another. Or you don’t, some days; some days you decide it’s time to go home, and you wake up at three a.m. slightly hungover and wracked with the guilt of your own complicity.

This is a problem faced, I think, by every left-leaning member of the bourgeoisie, and more so by those of us with a marked Epicurean bent. It is easier for those who are assuaged by self-denial; it is a fine thing to be an ascetic, to give everything up and go barefoot into the world with your begging bowl– to do so is a lovely sop to a bleeding conscience. But I’m afraid that that may be all that it is. As an example of what I mean: I saw recently a poster featuring a wooden bowl, a loincloth, a pair of glasses and some sandals. “These were Gandhi’s only possessions,” it said, and the clear implication was that you, too, should do this, or at least if you did do it you’d be superior to people who didn’t. But here is my problem with that concept. Somebody has to own the pot, the spoon and the stove in order to cook the rice to fill that begging bowl. Somebody needs to own a loom to weave the loincloth, the cobblers’ tools to make the sandals, and so forth. We cannot all go around with begging bowls. It is a fine renunciation of the World, and I’m glad it makes you feel morally superior, but it solves nothing. The fact that you own a begging bowl doesn’t drop the price of lentils, which is basically what the problem is.

So what’s a morally wracked left-wing bourgeois to do? History offers a couple of role models. If you’re George Bernard Shaw, you make a few changes in your lifestyle– you go vegetarian, say, or espouse Fabian socialism, and you bend your considerable wit and talent to the task of spreading the word to the others of your class. If you’re Che Guevara, you drop your stethoscope and pick up a gun, and you kill a lot of people for coming from the same class you come from and refusing to apologise for it. If you’re V.I. Lenin, you understand that the key is to raise the proletariat to the cultural level of the bourgeoisie, but unfortunately you’re too busy attempting to consolidate power in the hands of your own party, and apparently, your soaring cultural ideal is Socialist Realism, an art form which offers as much spiritual sustenance as a steady diet of desert sand.

But if you’re Salvador Allende, the late President of Chile and the only democratically elected Marxist in the world, you don’t do any of these things. Like all of these men, Salvador Allende was bourgeois; like Che, he was a doctor. Like George Bernard Shaw, Allende was an intellectual and a good writer. Like Lenin, Allende believed in elevating the cultural and economic level of the proletariat. But unlike any of them, Allende was never ashamed of being bourgeois.

This is the main reason that Allende is my hero. We, the bourgeoisie, are constantly coming under fire. We are accused of an obsession with trivial and unimportant things, of callousness, of poor taste, of extravagance, and so on. Each of these accusations is true, in its own way, but what is overlooked is that, as a class, we know how to live. And yes yes yes, we do our good living on the backs of the poor– nobody argues– but the point here is that everybody wants to be bourgeois. Only the bourgeoisie don’t. The bourgeoisie tie themselves in knots over the “humbling simplicity” that they see in other peoples’ ways of life, but they also ignore the fact that as soon as somebody comes along and says, hey, humble simple people, how would you like to have wine and steak three days a week, and go to the theatre, and, I don’t know, visit Paris, most of these humble simple people will jump at the chance. Why do you suppose the great dream of families in third world countries, or third world conditions in first world countries, is to get a really good education for their children? Education is your ticket of entry into the bourgeoisie, that’s why. Why do people, when they go from extreme poverty to sudden wealth, buy a Lexus for their mom? Because asceticism, as a chosen way of life, is a bourgeois luxury; if it’s forced on you, it turns out not to be so great.

Obviously, this is the simplified view. But the point is that we have it good, and Allende understood that, and instead of trying to reduce the goodness of his own life– instead of pulling a Che and living off of grubs in the jungle and shooting defectors, or pulling a Fidel and going, Oh, Communism is so my ticket to power, and suddenly becoming a Communist, and instead of pulling a Lenin and eating caviar off of the Kremlin silver while advocating that everybody else should live on a collective farm because farming is, er, noble– Allende set about trying to bring everybody else’s standard of living up to the level of his own.

He took the best elements of Cuba’s experiment– literacy campaigns, medical care, harnessing the energy of Chile’s idealistic middle-class youth and putting them to work helping out their countrymen. He avoided Cuba’s worst mistakes, assuring his country that religion would be respected, that differences of opinion would be respected, that nobody would be rounded up and shot as a dissident. And it was working, which was Allende’s downfall. He was effective, and so something had to be done to put a stop to him, because America’s greatest ideological defense against Communism was that it was always forcibly implemented, but Allende had changed that. So the shortages you hear of, the work stoppages, the strikes– the CIA paid for them all. They paid the trucker’s union to stop transporting food. They slaughtered cattle and tossed them in rivers to rot. They systematically brought the country to a pitch of unrest just high enough to justify a CIA-funded military coup, and put an end to democracy in the name of democracy.

It says a lot about Allende, as opposed to the Che Guevaras, Fidel Castros, Maos and Lenins, that the only person he ever shot was himself.

You have probably heard of Alexander Pope. If you’re most people in Generation X or whatever we are now, you’ve only just heard of him. If you’re very unlucky, your high school English teacher made you read “An Essay on Man” and left you thinking that everything Pope ever wrote was just like that. But if you’re very lucky (well, I
think you’re lucky), you have perhaps had to read “An Essay on Criticism” or “The Rape of the Lock” or even, perhaps, my personal favorite, the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.” Oh, how I love that poem.

The trouble with poor Alexander Pope is that he has passed out of fashion altogether. Shakespeare is harder to read, but the force of cultural habit and adoration– and, most people (including me) would argue, a superior genius– has kept him more or less current in everybody’s esteem for over 400 years. Swift had his political novel turned into an emasculated Disney animation, so his name has stuck around too (as it should). But the Victorians were awfully rough on Pope. His poetry was drawing-room poetry, they complained: contrived and mechanical, compared to the “wild warblings” of Shakespeare (you’ll forgive me if I ignore scholarly practice and don’t quote whichever bloody Victorian said that, because I’m too lazy to stand up and get the book and I bet you don’t care anyway). He wrote only of matters of the town, and the neat and elegant rhymes for which he was so celebrated in his time were too neat and elegant for the Victorians, who generally preferred their literature to be unfettered in style but unexceptionable in opinion or thought. The crystalline language that Pope used to express his volatile opinions was rather closer to an actual representation of the human condition than, say, Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” and was therefore deemed petty and unpleasant. Not only that, Pope’s style lacked the “masculinity” of Dryden and Swift; his rapier wit was considered mincing and unmanly next to the verbal clubs that his two mentors used to bludgeon people with whom they disagreed. Pope’s opinions in general came to be considered cruel and unnecessarily self-serving and vicious, which they probably were, but if you’ve ever properly read “The Dunciad,” you’ll forgive him.

It is precisely “The Dunciad” that makes Pope my hero, and makes him the villain of many other peoples’ literary worlds. (Okay, “many” is perhaps an exaggeration). “The Dunciad” is Pope’s mock-epic poem, a four-volume tour de force of spleen and bile. It was written as a reaction to an inferior writer, Colley Cibber, being named the Poet Laureate of England, which is why most people consider Pope to be an asshole– his wrath at Colley Cibber’s advance to the throne is seen as petty jealousy. Pope, they say, wanted the post for himself and was angry because he couldn’t have it. (By the way, one reason Pope couldn’t have it is because he picked the wrong time to be born Catholic. He also couldn’t own a house in London because of his religion, or hold public office. So).

But what is “The Dunciad”? It is nothing short of a glorious excoriation of the decline in quality of literature in England. Pope links the elevation of the appalling Cibber to a general want of taste among the public– and then he links the decline of taste to the end of civilization– using the form of the epic poem, which to Pope’s school of thought was possibly the highest form of literature. He writes the whole thing in the most serious high style, even including a ponderous foreword by his alter ego, “Martinus Scriblerus” who is himself a joint creation of Pope and some of his friends to mock the low state of learning coming to the forefront in English society.

I can hear you. You’re thinking, “Jesus, what a drama queen. It’s not like bad literature is enough to sink a society.” Or you’re thinking, “Holy shit, that sounds boring.” Ah, but you’re wrong! Both of you are wrong! Putting aside Pope’s sparkling wit, happy turns of phrase, conceptual genius and wonderfully vicious temper, I would like for a moment to discuss the phenomenon of the decline of language.

How many times have you been driving down the Interstate and passed a professionally produced sign which has a misplaced apostrophe, or which misuses quotes and amusingly changes the meaning completely, like the signs all over the Gulf Coast that say “Buy ‘fresh’ shrimp here”? How many times have you wanted to choke the life out of somebody in their mid-twenties who writes handwritten notes with IM abbreviations, like “were r u going?” or “ur mom tld me 2 tell u hi” or who actually says “LOL” out loud in a conversation?

The example of the decline of language most currently on my mind is something we saw at a Starbucks the other day, describing Willie Nelson as “our favorite journeyman.” All together now: what’s a journeyman? That’s right, a journeyman is a step up from an apprentice in the guild system. Now. Willie Nelson is, if anything, a master craftsman, so we assumed that Starbucks was referring to his habit of being on the road, or something. Why, why, didn’t somebody stop them, for God’s sake? Look, a hand-painted sign in Mississippi is one thing, and even the misuse of quotes as a graphic emphasizer is, I suppose, allowable. But when a glossy marketing brochure for a store that caters mostly to people who either have college degrees or are working on getting them just goes ahead and makes up a new meaning for a word still in current use, for God’s sake, what are you supposed to do?

But, you say, even if this is true– even if the use of precision in language is declining– why does this necessarily mean that civilisation is on its way out? Ah. Good question. Well– you’ve read “1984.” You know how the government systematically replaces verbal nuance with “good,” “ungood,” and “doubleplusgood”? Language, and one’s command over it, influences the thoughts that one is able to form. If you are not taught the concept of nuance, it will probably not come naturally to you. English is a particularly nuanced language, or at any rate has the potential of being so. Cultures who have been subjugated by English speakers note this particularly; according to speakers of Hindi, for example, English is remarkable because it enables you to lie without lying, which is another way of saying that we are capable of producing infinite shades of meaning based on our choice of vocabulary. Think about all of our words for “red”: scarlet, crimson, blood-red, rosy, vermillion– each one of these is an adjective that conveys something beyond merely the concept of “red,” and even the use of the word “red” over any of the other options conveys something.

In the most dire situation, when you lose the capability to speak in nuance, you lose the capacity to think in nuance; and once you’ve hit that point, you’re just a couple of steps away from 1984. Okay, more than a couple. Maybe.

Alexander Pope is my hero precisely because this issue of vocabulary, the issue of choosing exactly the right word, was incredibly important to him. He didn’t hate Colley Cibber because he was jealous; he hated Colley Cibber because his inferior plays and poetry were elevated above any number of more intelligent, more nuanced– and therefore more difficult– poets and playwrights, and it terrified him to think of what the future promised for everything that he held dear. If you think he was hysterical, consider the state of literature now. Plenty of good literature is being produced still, but its production has fallen in our societal esteem. Books are being published entirely in IM and email format, and while this could be interesting, it is in fact an excuse for people with incredibly mediocre minds to make books that are essentially soap operas– and that’s fine, but that stuff is being marketed now as “literature,” as something that can tell us something about the human condition, that can make us see things in a new light, that will add something valuable and lasting to our cultural heritage. We are also a culture that balks at making distinctions that denigrate anything or anyone, but without those distinctions we run the risk of living in a world where taste is arbited by MTV and news is what you get on FOX. Alexander Pope opened himself to attack and ridicule in defense of cultural standards, and he did it by adhering to his own standards for precision, nuance, form and literacy. Also, he’s a damn good read.

Everybody knows that the main point of a Humanities Department at a university is to provide a sort of academic Thunderdome: two ideas enter, one idea leaves (look, I’m sorry, but it just seems like the best analogy. Wait, come back!). The other idea is beaten to a bloody, discredited pulp and left to die an agonizing death in full public view. What makes a university better than the Thunderdome is that not only is the idea destroyed, but so is everybody who ever made the mistake of publicly thinking the idea. Awesome!

Nothing will ever come close to the gut-spilling internecine warfare that has turned English departments across the world from havens of intellectual appreciators of Art into crocodile pits at feeding time. Thank you, Critical Thought Since 1970! But all the other Humanities have had their share of the fun; even the relatively sober discipline of History has been rocked to its foundations in the last couple of decades by the titanic conflict between two conflicting theories of history. The first one, which has held sway for most of the modern age, declares that history is moved forward by Great Men– you know, Caesar, Napoleon, Churchill, Stalin. This theory holds that these men move boldly forward and the masses follow meekly, which is what masses are around to do. The second theory holds that the masses move history forward in an irresistible groundswell, and the Great Men are merely people lucky enough to be in a position to lead.

Honestly, there’s probably a third theory that takes the boring middle position between the two, and that’s where I, and a huge chunk of actual historians, fall personally. I think it’s fair to say that Great Men can’t get anywhere without the masses, but the masses do generally like to have somebody to lead them as well.

The trouble is that, as usual, the conservatives of the world have seized on the Masses theory as the root of all our modern evils– it’s the right-wing intellectual equivalent of the “single moms are destroying the American family” argument. This focus on the Masses, they say, has deprived us of what we really need in these troubled times. We need Heroes. We need people to look up to, shining moral examples to guide us on the path of Truth. All of this Masses business, with its insistence on seeing our Heroes as real people, with the extramarital affairs and shady business practices and slave-owning that lies behind even the best public figures, is only serving to unhinge the public. They don’t know what to believe anymore! They’ve lost their moral compass! Poor lambs!

Well. I don’t think the argument needs much rebuttal, except to point out that I am amused that liberals are the only ones accused of being patronising. Instead of arguing with the position, actually, I am going to throw in my support for half of it. (Only half). I think we do need heroes. We are constantly holding deserving people up as models for humanity– firefighters, rescue workers, philanthropists, and so forth. They do inspire us, and they do make us think about what matters, and they do make us measure our characters up to theirs.

Where we go wrong is in demanding their total moral purity, and this is where I disagree violently with the argument that admitting flaws diminishes heroism. The point of having heroes is, ostensibly, to show us all what we are capable of being; how much more effective is that lesson when you can also show that these people are not only extraordinary but ordinary as well? Perhaps I am in the minority, but I prefer my heroes to be complex and real people. They’re more interesting that way, and I don’t feel so much that their accomplishments are out of my reach.

So, with that in mind, I am starting a periodic list of my personal heroes in history, all of whom are flawed, some of whom are ignored or vilified, and some of whom have only the slightest thread of heroism to distinguish them.

First up: Alexander Pope!