The Courage to be Constant

I thought I’d take a break from all the heavy Klosterman quotes and go with a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole and his pal Lacey Rawlins as they ride from their home in southern Texas across the border into Mexico in search of work and adventure. Once in Mexico Cole is hired to breed horses for a wealthy Mexican rancher. However, during his stay at the hacienda, Cole develops a romantic relationship with the rancher’s mysterious and beautiful daughter, Alejandra.

In a pivotal scene near the book’s end, John Grady meets with Alejandra’s matriarchal aunt, who has saved his life under the terms that he never see the girl again. In attempting to explain to Cole the gravity of the situation he’s in, she relates the history of her people in Mexico and specifically shares the story of her own forbidden love. A love that ended in alienation and death. In recounting her story the aunt makes this observation:

I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily (p. 235).

I found this to be a particularly powerful book because it told a story where romantic love did not conquer all. Rather, what conquered was family, tradition, and constancy.

John Grady, despite his best efforts to find a way to make his love succeed, ultimately fails and his story ends in a state of lonely wondering. I wonder if McCarthy is onto something rather profound here. We are constantly bombarded by the ephemeral myth that true love can overcome not only the odds, but all meaningful social realities. If your family places certain boundaries upon you, well those boundaries should be crossed if you are really in love. If your station in life will not permit your love, well your station be damned. If your prior commitments to being a certain type of person — whether it be of character or value — if it is for true love, then it is right to abandon even yourself. This myth teaches us that it is only in the arms of the one we “love” that we will find the beatific vision, the sublime nexus of truth, goodness, and beauty. But McCarthy casts a vision of a place where romantic love does not win in the end. This is a vision of life where what truly counts is one’s prior commitments to character and tradition.

It seems this vision of the failure of romance is more true than the myth of conquering romance so prevalent in our culture. And it so in two distinct ways. First, this just seems to be the way things go. When people choose romance over family, tradition, station in life, or character, they inevitably lose more than they gain. There is a suffering that is felt in very deep and lasting ways. And the “true romance” often fades leaving one, in the end, wandering alone. The second reason McCarthy’s vision is more true is that it points to a truer reality: Fleeting romantic sentiments are not nearly as substantial and meaningful, and thus true, as are one’s commitments to family, tradition, station, and character. It turns out that the truly courageous act was for Alejandra to get on her train and leave John Grady Cole behind her. But because John Grady was a good American, who did not understand a courage premised on sacrifice for tradition and character rather than romance, he was left alone and confused.

Where Christ has said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?” McCarthy has added, “Or to gain true love only to wonder the desert alone.” And for this we should be grateful.

Klosterman: Led Zeppelin, “That Guy,” and The Hobbit

“Whenever I find myself in an argument about the greatest rock bands of all time, I always place Zeppelin third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This sentiment is incredibly common; if we polled everyone in North America who likes rock music, those three bands would almost certainly be the consensus selections (and in that order). But Zeppelin is far and away the most popular rock band of all time, and they’re popular in a way that Beatles and Stones cannot possibly compete with; this is because every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period of his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed. And there is no other rock group that generates that experience.

A few years ago, I was an on-air guest for a morning radio show in Akron. I was on the air with the librarian from the Akron public library, and we were discussing either John Cheever or Guided by Voices, or possibly both. Talk radio in Akron is f-cking crazy. While we were walking out of the studio, the librarian noticed the show’s 19-year-old producer; the producer had a blond mullet, his blank eyes were beyond bloodshot, and he was wearing ripped jeans and a black Swan Song T-shirt with all the runes from the Zoso album. The librarian turned to me and said, “You know, I went to high school with that guy.” This librarian is 42. But he was right. He did go to high school with that guy. So did I. Everyone in America went to high school with that guy. Right now, there are boys in fourth grade who do not even realize that they will become “that guy” as soon as they finish reading The Hobbit in eighth grade. There are people having unprotected sex at this very moment, and the fetus spawned from that union will become “that guy” in two decades. Led Zeppelin is the most legitimately timeless musical entity of the past half century; they are the only group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll that every male rock fan seems to experience in exactly the same way.”

~ Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (New York: Scribner, 2005), pp. 197-198.

The Empire Strikes Back, Reality Bites, and Gen X Optimism

“As the scene continues, Luke is driven out onto a catwalk, where he loses his right hand and is informed that he’s heir to the intergalactic Osama bin Laden. He more or less tries to commit suicide. Now, Luke is saved from this fate (of course), and since this is a movie, logic tells us that (of course) Vader will fall in the next installment of the series, even though it will take three years to get there. This is all understood. But that understanding is an adult understanding. As an eight-year-old, the final message of The Empire Strikes Back felt remarkably hopeless: Luke’s a good person, but Luke still lost. And it wasn’t like the end of Rocky, where Apollo Creed wins the split decision but Rocky wins the larger victory for human spirit; Darth Vader beats Luke the way Ike used to beat Tina. A psychologist once told me that — over the span of her entire career — she had never known a man who didn’t have some kind of creepy, unresolved issue with his father. She told me that’s just an inherent part of being male. And here we have a movie where the hero is fighting every ideology he hates, gets his ass kicked, and is then informed, “Oh, and by the way: I’m your dad. But you knew that all along.”

In the same scene, Darth Vader tells Skywalker he has to made a decision: He can keep fighting a war he will probably lose, or he can compromise his ethics and succeed wildly. Many young adults face a similar decision after college, and those seen as “responsible” inevitably choose the latter path. However, an eight-year-old would never sell out. Little kids will always take the righteous option. And what’s intriguing about Gen Xers is they never really wavered from that decision. Luke’s quandary in The Empire Strikes Back is exactly like the situation facing Winona Rider in 1994’s Reality Bites: Should she stick with the nice, sensible guy who treats her well (Ben Stiller), or should she roll the dice with the frustrating boho bozo who treats her like crap (Ethan Hawke)? For a detached adult, that answer seems obvious; for people who were twenty-one when this movie came out, the answer was just as obvious but completely different. As we all know, Winona went with Hawke. She had to. When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed Reality Bites, I recall them complaining that Ryder picked the wrong guy; as far as I could tell, choosing the wrong guy was the whole point.

As I stated earlier, all the cliches about Gen Xers were true — but the point everyone failed to make was that our whole demographic was comprised of cynical optimists. Whenever my circa-1993 friends and I would sit around and discuss the future, there was always the omnipresent sentiment that the world was on the decline, but we were somehow destined to succeed individually. Everyone felt they would somehow be the exception within an otherwise grim universe. This is why Ryder had to pick Hawke. Winona made the kind of romantic decision most people my age would have made in 1994: She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing, and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence. Not coincidently, this is also the Jedi’s path. Adventure? Excitement? The Jedi craves not these things. However, he does crave something greater than the bloodless existence of his father. Quite simply, Winona Ryder is Luke Skywalker, only with a better haircut and a killer rack.”

~ Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 154-155.

Klosterman on Left Behind

“This is not a problem for the born again. There are no other subjects, really; nothing else — besides being born again — is even marginally important. Every moment of your life is a search-and-rescue mission: Everyone you meet needs to be converted and anyone you don’t convert is going to hell, and you will be partially at fault for their scorched corpse. Life would become unspeakably important, and every conversation you’d have for the rest of your life (or until the Rapture — whichever comes first) would really, really, really matter. If you ask me, that’s pretty glamorous. And Left Behind pushes that paradigm relentlessly. Another of its primary characters — airline pilot Rayford Steele — becomes born again after he loses his wife and twelve-year-old son. However, his skeptical college-aged daughter Chloe doesn’t make God’s cut, so much of the text revolves around his attempts to convert Chloe to “The Way.” And the main psychological hurdle Steele must overcome is the fact that he’s not an obtrusive jackass, which Left Behind says we all need to become. “Here I am, worried about offending people,” Rayford thinks to himself at the beginning of chapter 19. “I’m liable to ‘not offend’ my own daughter right into hell.” The stakes are too high to concern oneself with manners.

This is ultimately what I like about the Born-Again Lifestyle: Even though I see fundamentalist Christians as wild-eyed maniacs, I respect their verve. They are probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah Culture — the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid and that no one can be judged. As far as I can tell, most people I know are like me; most of the people I know are bad people (or they’re good people, but they consciously choose to do bad things). We deserve to be judged.

I realize that liberals and libertarians and Michael Stipe are always quick to quote the Bible when you say something like that, and they’ll tell you, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” And that’s a solid retort for just about anything, really. But the thing with born agains is that they want to be judged. They can’t f@%king wait. That’s why they’re cool.”

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 235-236.

Klosterman on Cracker Barrel

“Outside the rain has started to fall. Perhaps I can find a restaurant that will let me sit by a window and stare at the lightning. That would be moving. I see no difference between romance and solitude. It turns out I only need to drive 45 seconds to find the establishment I desire: There is a Cracker Barrel across the road. Cracker Barrel is sublime: You can order chicken and dumplings with a side order of dumplings. That’s advanced. I buy a newspaper and tell the hostess I want to sit by the window, buy only families get to do that — you need at least five people to get window seats. Instead, my booth overlooks the Cracker Barrel outlet store, a cluttered shop where travelers buy $22 sweatshirts promoting the flag of North Carolina. It reminds of the Chilean flag. I see no difference between commerce and patriotism.”

~ Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (New York: Scribner, 2005), pp. 67-68.

What’s In A Name

I want to offer a plug for my friend “Ivan.”  He has written a very interesting and very humorous article about pseudonyms, name branding, and culture. 

Go on, read it. 

I Feel a Breakdown Coming

I feel myself descending
The way I often do
I get the feeling that there’s no ending
When I can’t afford to lose

So, let me pass them by
Don’t try to state your case
I’ve had my fill of trials
And I will be on my way

Just don’t leave town
When you’re down, down, down
Just don’t give up
On the place you’ve grown to love

‘Cause when you turn your back
Bad feelings attack

Come on, now, we know my hands been played out
With city lights tonight, these stars just fade out
I need to stretch my legs, I need to start running
I feel it close, I feel a breakdown coming

Just don’t leave town
When you’re down, down, down
Just don’t give up
On the place you’ve grown to love

‘Cause when you start to pack
Bad feelings attack

~ Dolorean, “Just Don’t Leave Town,” You Can’t Win (Yep Roc, 2007).

The (Not So) Glorious Revolution

“The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought against the new wealth the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660 you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that social world which underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in this country.”

~ Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, pp. 67-68.

Capitalism as Moral Anarchy

“For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by self-governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and which goes by the name of Capitalism.”

~ Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), p. 52.

Is Christianity Theocratic?

Danny Jenkins raised an interesting point in his response to the Badiou quote about identity politics and capitalistic territorialization I posted last week. His comment was that the Hauerwasian system, “refuses to allow the Christian narrative to capitulate to a standard of rationality foreign to it.” In other words, for Hauerwas (and others of like mind) the narrative of the church is prior to and more fundamental than any narrative “the world” has on offer, which in the west is primarily the narrative of the secular.

I agree with Danny’s appraisal of the “Hauerwasian system,” and because I agree with it I find the relationship between Christianity and the wider public sphere to be a most interesting issue. Because America is a secular nation it is assumed that there is something prior to and more fundamental than any particular religious tradition that allows diverse groups of people to come together and achieve a common good. In the case of the West, that something prior is “rationality.” In his book, Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argues that,

Central to democratic thought as I understand it is the idea of a body of citizens who reason with one another about the ethical issues that divide them, especially when deliberating on the justice or decency of political arrangements. It follows that one thing a democratic people had better have in common is a form of ethical discourse, a way of exchanging reasons about ethical and political topics. The democratic practice of giving and asking for ethical reasons, I argue, is where the life of democracy principally resides.

~ Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), p. 6.

Key here for Stout is that we, as a diverse members of a democratic society, need to come together and reason with one another about the ethical issues that shape our political life together. There are two important things to note in Stout’s argument:

First, unlike other liberal democratic theorists like John Rawls and Richard Rorty, Stout believes that particular ethical convictions, which are derived from particular socio-linguistic traditions, ought to play a part in America’s democratic deliberation. In this regard, Stout is acknowledging that a person’s conception of the good is, perhaps more than anything else, shaped by their religious convictions. Furthermore, he is acknowledging the merit of “traditionalists” like MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank who argue that each particular tradition has its own unique rationality inherent to the tradition itself.

Second, despite giving this nod to what Stout refers to as the “New Traditionalism,” he maintains that there there is a form of reasoning prior to and more fundamental than these particular religious traditions. Thus, while seemingly affirming the argument of the Hauerwasian system — that ethical convictions are not derived from universal reason but from particular traditions — Stout goes on to posit a base-level rationality that is large enough to encompass all other traditioned particularities.

Stout’s positing of such a base-level rationality is seen most clearly in his chapter addressing the claims of John Milbank. Milbank, who rejects the narrative of a secularity more fundamental than Christianity, does so on the basis that the secular narrative inherently works to police the narrative of Christianity into a posture of submission. In response to this Stout counters that,

[Secularism] entails neither the denial of theological assumptions nor the expulsion of theological expression from the public sphere. And it leaves believers free to view both the state and democratic political culture as domains standing ultimately under divine judgment and authority. That believers view the political sphere in this way does not entail that others will, of course. But this just means that the age of theocracy is over, not that the anti-Christ has taken control of the political sphere (Democracy and Tradition, 93).

But what is Stout here advocating other than the basic separation of church and state? In the land of religious freedom all are welcome, and even encouraged, to worship in their own manner, so long as they don’t expect any one else to have to share in their religious convictions… of course. And this is where Stout really belies his ideological convictions, for by adding “of course” he is essentially saying “duh!” It is just common sense that no one should have to accept as reality that God is in control. But what this means is that, even though you can believe what you want, it will not have real purchase in the political sphere, at least as a discourse-shaping narrative. Rather, the political sphere requires a narrative that supersedes all religious and traditional particularities, a proposition that, for the radical Christian, is unacceptable. Radical Christianity must reject the “common sense” of Stout’s democratic deliberation, because it requires a subordination of the Christian narrative to the narrative of the state.

Stout claims that this subordiation of the Chrisitan narrative to the narrative of the state does not mean the anti-Christ has taken control. Instead, he argues, it simply means we’ve moved beyond the age of Theocracy. However, I’m wondering if there is a difference. If we have to subordinate our narrative to that of the state or some other form of rationality, thus relegating Christian conviction to the realm of the private, are we not abdicating Christ from the public sphere? Is this not anti-Christ?

It seems that Christian convictions require that we refuse to be just one voice among many within a neutral or secular public sphere. We must refuse a rationality or narrative that is prior to or more fundamental than Christianity. If this makes us Theocratic, then so be it.