Part 2—The soul of the pseudo-progressive: Would anyone but the New York Times ever have published such nonsense?
We refer to the anguished, eliminationist-favored essay by 27-year-old Tom Whyman, a young philosophy lecturer who took last week's Brexit vote rather hard.
Poor Whyman! In Hampshire County, where he summers with his mum, 55 percent of his fellow Brits had voted for Leave. Whyman himself would have voted Remain, had he actually managed to vote.
Displaying familiar contempt for The Others, the narrow win by Leave led Whyman to vilify all his neighbors and all his fellow citizens. He specifically cited the 80-somethings who look at him "with blank stares."
Are we sure he wasn't thinking of the unfortunate teenagers in his philosophy classes?
So upset was Whyman by the vote, in which he didn't himself take part, he imagined a better world, in which all his neighbors were dead, or at least no longer existed. An anguished headline topped his piece:
"Hell is Other Britons," the headline dramatically said.
There's no sign that his New York Times editors knew it, but Whyman was channeling Sartre, the deep-thinking existentialist deep thinker. More specifically, he was channeling an anguished line from Sartre's anguished 1944 dramaturgical work, Huis Clos (No Exit).
Here! We'll let the world's leading authority limn it:
No Exit (French: Huis Clos) is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original title is the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors...Hell is other people—presumably, all other people! That's the way poor Whyman felt in the wake of the narrow election in which, in best slackistentialist fashion, he himself failed to take part.
The play is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. It is the source of Sartre's especially famous and often misinterpreted quotation "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people," a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object in the world of another consciousness.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, did Whyman find himself caught in the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object in the world of another consciousness? In a sense, but not as such!
At any rate, the New York Times rushed to publish the ridiculous, human-hating madness which had started life as a blog post. And the Times must have loved Whyman's post a great deal. They made the youngster's ludicrous piece the featured essay on the front page of last weekend's hard-copy Sunday Review. Presumably, they dumped some other piece at the last minute, they loved Whyman's essay so much.
(Full disclosure: We were forced to read Huis Clos as a high school senior, part of our French 5 class. At least one local wag rewrote Sartre's famous line at that time. "Hell is being required to read Huis Clos," this local wag thoughtfully said.)
Would anyone but the New York Times have published such an appalling piece? We will guess that the answer is no—but in comments, many Times readers seemed to understand the point of the piece within the New York Times context.
These commenters happily told the world how great the young philosopher's essay was. More specifically, they said the essay reminded them of the hell of the other people in the American towns where they had been forced to grow up.
Progressives, can we talk? In the context of the New York Times, Whyman's essay was an attack on Those People, The Others, the sluggard white working class.
Holding contempt for such people has long been a prominent part of pseudo-progressive culture. Such open contempt lies at the soul of the foppish Times and its low-IQ, self-impressed readers.
There's a long history here. In the 1950s, Hollywood films of William Inge scripts helped the world understand that everyone in the Midwest was crazy. See, for example, Splendor in the Grass and Picnic.
(We especially recommend Rosalind Russell's especially crazy breakdown in Picnic.)
At the same time, Hollywood films of Tennessee Williams and Erskine Caldwell scripts helped us see that everyone in the white South was crazy. (We especially recommend Baby Doll and God's Little Acre.) The mentality behind such works produced a famous moment in December 1972, when Times film critic Pauline Kael expressed surprise that Nixon had won the White House again.
“I live in a rather special world," Kael was quoted saying, by her own New York Times. "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
She didn't say that she could smell them. But an extremist would say that she was tilting that way.
Existentialists, please! Disdain for the white working class is a long-standing staple of pseudoliberal culture. We'll guess that the New York Times saw its spirit in Whyman's human-hating piece, in which he announced that his home town is "my own personal hell;" that "you will find the demons crawling" if you examine life in that town; and, most gloriously, that "Hell is Other Britons."
Among the right-thinking philosopher class, contempt for The Others can run very strong where The Others are the white working-class. Consider a book review in last Wednesday's New York Times.
The review was written by Dwight Garner, a perfectly reasonable New York Times book reviewer. The new book bears a daring, provocative title:
"White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America"
The new book is by Professor Isenberg of LSU. We often marvel at her political pieces in the new improved Salon. We soon found ourselves puzzled by aspects of her new book.
As he started his review, Garner indicated that Isenberg's sentiments lay with the lower-income whites whose history she was writing. More specifically, it seemed that Isenberg was writing in protest of the way this group has been reviled down through American history.
That said, we were soon puzzled by some quotations from Isenberg's book—by this one, for example:
GARNER (6/22/16): America did not develop a House of Lords, yet we imported the rigging of the British class system, Ms. Isenberg argues. This was hardly a land of equal opportunity. Brutal labor awaited most migrants. There was little social mobility.It would leave its mark on white trash, full stop? White trash, with no scare quotes around the pejorative term?
“Puritan religious faith did not displace class hierarchy, either; the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves,” she observes. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.”
That seemed like a strange thing to write. But as we continued along, Garner dropped a few similar quotes:
GARNER: From this beginning, Ms. Isenberg moves confidently forward, through, for example, the class issues that undergirded the Civil War and the popular eugenics movement, favored by Theodore Roosevelt, that marked many as targets for sterilization. Slavery and racism are hardly discounted in this book, but she maintains her focus on poor whites.Really? We might call North Carolina the white trash colony, full stop? Bill Clinton's affair could be likened to a “white trash outing on the grand national stage?"
She singles out North Carolina as “what we might call the first white trash colony.” It was swampy and, thanks to its shoal-filled shoreline, lacked a major port. It had no real planter class. Its citizens were viewed as sluggards, “cowardly Blockheads” in the words of one early writer. Another referred to the state as the lawless “sinke of America.”
[...]
Trailer parks, redolent of “liberty’s dark side,” come under her appraisal, as do movies like “Deliverance.” (She finds its redneck caricatures to be loathsome.) The careers of Dolly Parton, Jimmy Carter, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Bill Clinton are analyzed. Mr. Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky resulted in a spectacle that the author likens to a “white trash outing on the grand national stage.”
We were puzzled by the use of this pejorative in a book by an august professor. And alas! When we got a chance to examine Professor Isenberg's actual book, it seemed to us that she was strangely cavalier in her use of this ugly pejorative.
Her carelessness seemed to have infected her publisher. This text is taken live and direct from the book's dust jacket:
The wretched and landless poor have always been a part of American culture from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements. In her ground-breaking history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg explodes our comforting myths about equality in the land of opportunity, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present poor white trash.
"The ever-present poor white trash?" That strikes us as unusual language—but at the Penguin Random House web site, the formulation is even stranger.
The lofty publisher refers to, and yes we're quoting, "the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash." That formulation strikes us as deeply strange, and yet as highly familiar.
Darn those poor white trash! They're always embarrassing, if occasionally entertaining! So of course are the pseudo-progressives who produce the weekly Sunday Review, perhaps the most foppish Sunday section American journalism has ever produced.
"Hell is Other [People]," a rather peculiar young Brit declared. The New York Times rushed his craziness into print.
Reading comments, it seemed to us that readers had discerned the message. The finer folk always seem to know what people like Whyman have meant.
Tomorrow: Hell is the white working class
Later today: Deep-thinking Sartre's apricot cocktails
Old Mr. Somerby seems to have disappeared at least one comment in the Times on the work of Young Mr. Whyman. When reading it I thought it equally applicable to the work of both these two very similar writers and thinkers:
ReplyDelete"This writer appears to suffer from what ails many children from affluent communities. They seem to resent their affluence while taking full advantage of its benefits. There seems to be a good deal of self-loathing maybe because his career choice has left him short of the life ambitions he might have. He derides other people's condescension while heaping it on others because they don't share his POV or goals. He is basically a hypocrite as are most self-righteous liberals. He probably would benefit from seeing a shrink and get over his obvious seething anger."
It is a pity Mr. Whyman has wandered at such an early age into the bitter state that seems to have consumed Mr. Somerby after his comedy career descended into blogger-rant belligerence.
I keep humming a song from 1962 (okay, really 1975) "Nothing but the dead and dying in my little town."
ReplyDeleteThe other day I started to read "No exit" which is available for free online, and isn't even that long. I got halfway through the torment, until I realized that I did have an exit - I could find something else to do.
Ah well, that's further than I got in to "Being and Nothingness". It's okay though, Kung covers him in his "Does God Exist?" which I read in its entirety - and it wasn't even assigned by my German teacher.
Europe needs a real opposition party, and the European center-left desperately needs a viable agenda. Transforming themselves into a real opposition party in Brussels could meet both needs, and save both social democracy and the European project.
ReplyDeleteAs you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.
ReplyDelete@ 6:10 PM - makes perfect sense to me.
DeleteI just want my kids back.
ReplyDeleteIt's unacceptible to criticize blacks, gays, women, transsexuals, Moslems, Jews, disabled people, Hispanics, Native Americans, etc. Liberals should be grateful for White Trash. Liberals need to have a group of people to whom they can feel superior.
ReplyDeleteThe term was coined by enslaved House servants of color. It was later adopted by their masters, who used it even after their property was seized and dispersed during and after the War of Northern Aggression.
Delete"Liberals need to have a group of people to whom they can feel superior."
DeleteNo "need" as long as there are people like you.
They do feel superior against those groups you mention, they just can't say it. Those people don't come to their parties believe me!
Delete3:56 is a must on every liberal party guest list and he observes who is there in detail.
DeleteRead his book "How to Pick Up Liberal Chicks."
Discriminating against someone on the basis of a protected status is not the same as criticizing them. If a disabled person makes a spelling error, of course you can point it out. If a transsexual person tells a joke but mangles the punchline, you can say he or she isn't good at joke telling. Where do you get these ideas?
DeleteI sometimes disagree with David, but I respect actuaries.
Delete@ 10:38 PM - noble effort, but good luck penetrating David's Wall of Obstinate Stupidity.
Delete10:38 -- since "The Bell Curve" makes many assertions, I'm unsure which of them you claim is long debunked. Here's one guess: Maybe you're referring to an assertion NOT made in "The Bell Curve", namely that blacks have lower IQs for genetic reasons. Even though the book specifically disavows this point several times, many critics of the book misrepresented it as making such assertion.
DeleteIt was good of the Times to have reprinted the blog piece of this young Englishman. It allowed Bob Somerby to tap into the vast literary memories of his own student days. The result is a series unlike any he has concocted in recent memory, exploring the failings of modern liberals, a group few recognize for the dumb, lazy, and totally dislikeable tribal beings they have become. This groundbreaking series will explode your comforting myths about the commitment of liberals to equality and their complicity in the rise of Nixon and Reagan.
ReplyDeleteHow long might this series last? Our guess? It will equal and perhaps exceed his revelation of the Manchurian we have all become and will be no less of a picnic for those who find the truth discomforting.
Hey troll,
DeleteWhen Somerby wrote that whole "dumb, lazy, tribal" thing, he wasn't talking about you.
No, really. Don't worry about it. He was talking about someone else. You're great. You're smart, and certainly not lazy. And I'm sure you have many views that aren't taken from tribal leaders.
"This whole system is discomforting!" - the veteran actor, contacted by phone at his residence, was heard to exclaim.
DeleteSomerby seems to think that the views of Pauline Kael—a movie critic— is relevant to his theme of bias against working class whites. This takes "anecdotal evidence" to a whole new realm; in this case, even the single anecdote cited is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
ReplyDeleteKael did not work for the Times.
DeleteShame on Bob. He knows better than to pepetuate "The Fraudulent Factoid That Refuses to Die."
Deletehttp://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Factoid-That-Refuses-to-Die
Are you honestly disputing such a theme exists? Or are you being pedantic, and just seeking to waste time?
DeleteNo. I am disputing the relevance of Somerby's Kael anecdote to the theme.
DeleteOthers are disputing Somerby's accuracy and apparently integrity. Do you accept their comments and challenge only mine?
Strangely, Somerby actually quotes Kael accurately but then puts the usual spin on it. (I have a feeling he might be misinterpreting the Isenberg book as well, although I can't say for sure without having read it.)
DeleteHey Matt, since I'm not signed into Reddit, anything new on the Gamergate controversy? You d' man on that shit.
DeleteSomerby has used (misused) the Kael quote more than the entire right collectivbely. Sadly, abuse of this quote reveals exactly the same mindset as abuse of Gore's internet quote although, as @ 4:04 notes, Kael is only a movie critic.
DeleteOdds that 47-year-old Mr. Whyman looks back on this essay and cringes - 100%.
ReplyDeleteOdds that Mr. Whyman is eaten by a carniverous plant in the "Reclaim It" uprising by English vegetation armies - 62%.
DeleteIt would be fitting if it were the "Prunus armeniaca From 'ell" what eats 'im.
DeleteMore likely just some aging watercress with a blank stare and an English overbite.
Maybe a triffid?
DeleteTriffids were fictional plants created by
DeleteJohn Wyndham. We are rooting, pardon the pun, for real plants to eat Tom Whyman.
Both are English. And the Triffid is almost as old as Somerby. So it is easy to see why you might be overenthusiastic on this point about a vital issue and personage.
I didn't see the essay as an attack on the white working underclass. That's a stretch, if anything, with houses priced in the $1.5+ million range, that town as described, reminds me more of a Carmel CA, or a Laguna Beach, upscale tourist and boutique communities that priced out the working class long ago.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I do agree that pseudo-liberals are disgracefully disdainful and condescending towards the working class in general.
I can appreciate a good angry punk rant from time to time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN4GNsYIUE8
It wasn't an attack on the white working class, upper, middle or lower. And it wasn't particularly liberal nor American. It just was in the hated NY Times and could be fit into Bob Somerby's meme. This is the way our childish minds actually work. As the great existentialist declared in the Daily Howler, "Hell is white liberals!"
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