Never in my lifetime have I seen the electorate so passionate, and never before have the two sides seemed so utterly, unshakeably certain of themselves.

Campaigns are not the best places to seek out public confessions of self-doubt, but the certitude on display in this race has long since crossed the threshold from confidence to delusion, and whoever is elected on Tuesday (or whenever it ends) will soon be smacked in the face with the cold hard truth.

So speaks Matt Welch in the present issue of Reason Magazine. And he’s right, plainly. We are looking at a mighty standoff between the two parties.

What’s missing are all the old ear marks of thoughtfulness, deliberation, and judiciousness. That long, searching pause in which we try to search out the best response: “Well, yes, that’s a good point, but the way I see it…” “I have to think about this a little more, but I think its possible that…” When was the last time you heard one of these phrases in a political conversation between Democrats and Republicans. Now, it’s more like “Jane, you brainless twat…”

Anthropologically, this is interesting. What can we say at a minimum? That the friends of the two parties now hew to opinions that are not just different but oppositional, that one person’s truth is another’s poison, that the opposition is supposed to be not just wrong, but fundamentally, utterly mistaken. The political other is no longer “different from you and me,” they are now the anti-Christ, wrong to their very core, corrupt in their very essence. Sometimes you wonder whether a Holy War is not just something for the international stage.

Anthropologically, this is challenging. Do we know what one party believes to be true of the other? Can we parse these out, if only in a very preliminary way? I think this would be useful. For we are constructing one another when we engage in these debates. And it is precisely because this construction is so vilifying and condemnatory from the beginning that debate is so…little like debate.

What does the Democratic side believe to be true of the Republican side. 1) That they have no moral compass, 2) that whatever is is right, 3) that the state should not intervene to correct or protect, 4) that they refuse moral responsibility outside the boundary of the self, family, church and community, 5) that all the rest is a Darwinian free for all, 6) that the success of the republican regime means we are very close to going to hell in a hand basket, 7) that the environment, international politics, and the succoring state are all distinctly tipped in the direction of something cataclysmic (this way comes). Roughly.

What does the Republican side believe to be true of the Democratic side. 1) that they have no moral compass, 2) that they are deeply committed to a dangerously self indulgent individualism on the one hand, and a intrusive state regime on the other, 3) that they presume to know better than the individual, 4) that they will not allow the marketplace to be a (perhaps the) agent that reveals collective interests and intentions, 5) that they would choke off this marketplace in order to restore the world to order and in the process frustrate the most adaptive device at our disposal, 6) that they will fundamentally will not let the world be, but insist instead on a vanity of interference, on a presumption of knowledge in a world that long ago passed into complexities and dynamisms that are essentially inscrutable. More or less. (Hey, it’s Sunday afternoon. I am trying to watch the Giants beat, um, the other team.)

What’s scary from an anthropological point of view is how completely counter paradigmatic these assumptions are. What you believe I can’t imagine thinking. What I declaim you find virtually unintellligable. Surely, its time to start the debate again with a careful eye to what the deeper differences are. They may not be any negotiating them, but the terrible din of mutual incomprehension has surely run its course.

One thought on the difference. If you stand way back, squint your eyes, and look for the forest, here’s one thing that leaps out. The Republicans dislike the Democrats’ presumption that “they know best.” And the Democrats, when they examines the argument of the Republicans, content that “they just don’t care.”

These are two notions of morality. The Democrats say morality means caring, sharing, and making an effort. From their point of point of view, the Republicans’ notion of less government and more marketplace looks like a refusal of morality, a declaration of indifference, a Darwinian brutality. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. They believe that it indexes an absense of morality.

The Republicans say morality means staying out of the way, letting individuals do, risk, engage as they will and collectivities to shape themselves accordingly. From their point of view, the Democrats’ notion of intervention looks like a bleeding hearted presumption that the Liberal Left must know better than the world. They cannot see that this represents a moral position. The believe it represents a self flattery, an addled refusal to respect the emergent will of the world.

This is bullshit, I’m sure. But you see what I am trying to get at. The fundamental terms of the disagreement to which Matt refers. How is it that the two parties are now so utterly mutually exclusive in their assumptions? We need to get to the bottom of this. We need one set of terms that can encompass both points of view. How very pre post modern of me.

Besides, there are more pressing things to think about. Like whether the Vikings can make up a 22 point deficit in the remaining 12 minutes. Frankly, I don’t think so. And that’s the thing about Vikings. Really, they just don’t get it…

References

Welch, Matt. 2004 The Great Divide. The National Post. Reason Magazine and available at Welch’s website

One of Canada’s most interesting and able columnists, Diane Francis, has come up with an ingenious account of why the American polls may be misleading.

I suspect that most of the so-called “undecided” voters are voting for Bush but are embarrassed to say so. The dislike for Bush, among his opposition, has become so vicious that any of his supporters are regarded as stupid or worse.

This interesting little suggestion implies that poll respondents believe that they are more likely to be talking to Democratic supporters than Republican ones when being polled. It also implies, as Francis points out, that the Democrats are more likely to heap scorn upon the Republicans than the other way around.

Anyhow, if there is an unexpectedly large Bush victory on Tuesday, you heard it here second.

References

The Francis article from the National Post can be found here.

The reviews for the Ray Charles movie are now in and everyone seems to agree that Jamie Foxx is very good indeed. The New York Times called his performance “inventive, intuitive, and supremely intelligent.”

This raises one of the compelling little puzzles of our time. Why and how it is that so many people who begin their careers as stand up or improv comedians end up flourishing in more dramatic assignments on stage and screen. Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, and Jim Carrey all have demonstrated unsuspected dramatic abilities.

Surely, comedy is the last place we might expect to find someone capable of plumbing the depths of the human heart. Comedians are supposed to be interested in the cheap laugh, the easy out, the throw away line. This is why we contrast tragedy and comedy.

Technically, things are less mysterious. You can’t be a good comedians unless you have a suberb control of body and voice. Training for the stage is about learning how to make everything count. Training for improv is about seizing the opportunity. Both of these work well on film.

It is also true, in Mr. Foxx’s case, that he is actually very good at playing football and the piano. Not usually at the same time. And this gave him a useful preparation for Any Given Sunday and the Ray Charles project.

lI wondered if this might be a small part of the answer here: that actors tend not to be very good at much of anything except of course acting like people who are good at something. Comedians start later and they sometimes have real life experience on which to draw.

But there must be more to it than this.

Pam’s home is not much larger than a Tokyo hotel room. So we went to a couple of open houses over the weekend.

One place was kind of sweet and sad. It had an Asian theme: Japanese pottery, bamboo flooring, Balinese textiles, a Buddha sculpture, Tibetan art—an effort, apparently, to cultivate massive amounts of serenity. And it must have failed. I mean, surely, if you had a home this serene, you would never move. But someone was.

So who was the owner? Why was serenity so terribly important? And what went wrong? Was the owner a refugee from a new age religious cult? (Was this his spiritual “half way” house?) Was the owner a dot.com entrepreneur who was trying to shift down from the maniacal life style that had made him his fortune? (Was this house a kind of architectural air bags?) Had this guy actually found some place more serene? (I had a hard time imagining this. Anything more serene would have been stupefying.)

This is my idea for a game show. Every Saturday across America between 2:00 and 4:00 there are hundreds of thousands of open houses. One of these open houses should be wired for image and sound, capturing reactions as visitors move through the house. Once they leave the house, they should be discretely removed to an interview area, and asked to describe the home owner. The person with the best answer gets to keep the home.

North Americans have an astonishingly detailed knowledge of the world of consumer goods. We are very good reading the material record and leaping to conclusions. I notice that one of the demands of life in Connecticut is a mastery of the lifestyle implications of the “S,” “E,” “C” distinctions in the Mercedes line. (My conclusion so far: it’s illusive, important, and generally speaking intelligible only to those with many years [perhaps many generations] of residence here.) This would make for interesting, and thoroughly anthropological television. It would reveal a cultural literacy we all possess but don’t much talk about. And of course this literacy varies with age, class, gender, lifestyle, region (and on and on) and all of this would be very interesting to see. Most important? Someone gets to win a house.

No, most important, we would see how thoroughly our material culture makes our culture material. There are no cultural distinctions that do not have material expression (not for long anyhow). We have a more sophisticated knowledge of the social order that we generally acknowledge and it is contained in the fine, fine distinctions of the consumer culture. I can’t tell whether this knowledge of the material code is disaggregated because it has to be (that’s who we are) or whether its disaggregated because we cannot let go the old categorical systems. (I think there is an old Steven Reich joke: “Your socks are different colors. They don’t match.” “Yes, they do. They’re the same weight.”)

There is of course a less anthropological, more literary opportunity here. You remember the scene in Wonder Boys where Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) and Terry Craptree (Robert Downey Jr.) are speculating about the life story of someone at a bar, but then James Leer (Tobey Maquire) comes out of his apparent coma to supply an imaginative rendering so interesting and so plausible that you can hear Tripp, the failed novelist, thinking, “why do I bother.” I am not sure what the right prize here would be, but I am leaning heavily in the direction of a “S” class Mercedes.

I’m in Connecticut for the moment. This is from a phone call last night:

Grant: She’s getting back Thursday night, so the soonest she could call you is Friday.

Caller: But that’s tomorrow, silly.

Grant: Is it? I thought tomorrow was Thursday.

Caller: [pause] well, I guess I’m just as confused as everybody else.

Grant [to himself]: No, I think we’ve demonstrated you are more confused than everybody else.

Call it malevolent meccano. The new Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas looks menacing in an innocent sort of way, like a children’s toy working up the courage to consume the city. Not too big, not too small, Seattle, you can hear it thinking, would make a nice light snack.

Apparently, the frightening half of the message was deliberate. “I thought it was important that you have a sense of awe when you come into a public building, especially a library.” So says Deborah Jacobs, Seattle’s chief librarian.

How really sad. Jacobs is charged with getting people into libraries. Her institution is surrounded by formidable distractions: Hollywood, television, sports, theatre, blogging. She is also up against new competitors: especially Google which now serves each of us daily as a librarian without precedent or parallel.

Is awe really the way to make the Seattle Public Library more accessible? Clearly not. Awe will make this institution less accessible.

So what was Jacobs doing? I have an uneasy feeling that this is self aggrandizement. I think Jacobs figures that if the library is a thing of awe, she must be the keeper of awe. Koolhaas’ building has the effect of making her awesome.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have seen this sort of thing in the museum world. (Yes, I can: 47 times.) We don’t pay museum professionals very well. We don’t hold their institutions in very high esteem. And at the very moment, museologists and librarians should be struggling to return themselves to usefulness, they are inclined to find someway to dress themselves up in grandeur or, in Jacobs’ case, intimidation.

Well, bad luck on Jacobs. The Seattle Library ends up being intimidation lite. Whether this is incompetence or mischief on Koolhaas’ part, we can never know. I am betting it’s the latter, and his idea of truth in packaging.

Libraries truly are over. (Why they spend all this money on the Seattle one is a mystery. This would have bought a lot of public access for the digitally disadvantaged.) Once gateways to knowledge, the library is now an archeological remainder.

The librarian responds by protesting the institution’s majesty. Koolhaas may be making a somewhat different point, that the institutions that sprang from paper-based knowledge are, and must be made to look, rather less intimidating in the coming era of ubiquitous and instantaneous digital access.

Reference

Goldberger, Paul. 2004. High-Tech Bibliophilia. The New Yorker. May 24, 2004, pp. 90-92.

Last note: this is the 200th entry of this blog. Trade your ticket stubs for the beverage on your choice (small) in the lobby!

Ricky Williams is an All-Star running back for the Miami Dolphins who abruptly quit professional football just weeks before the present season began. (His team is now in a 0-5 free fall.) Ricky Williams was making $3.5 million dollars a season when he left the game. Esquire magazine caught up with him recently. They found him living in a $7-a-day campsite in Brisbane, Australia.

I was talking to the daughter of a friend of mine, “Sandra” we’ll call her. Sandra is a second year college student with formidable intellectual gifts and a superb pre-college education. She told me she was planning to work in a clothing store this summer because she feels, as she put it, “like I have been in a harness since I will 12.” After the rigors of her college prep, minimum wage at a clothing store looked like a vacation.

Usually, two data points is everything this anthropologist needs to leap to a conclusion. (That’s what I’m going to call my autobiography: Leaping to Conclusions.) But in this case, more data was forthcoming. 60 Minutes did a piece a couple of weeks ago on people in their 20s. It claimed that all of these people had been as children programmed to within an inch of their lives, and some of them have been pushed really hard.

“Hmm,” I thought, “just like Ricky and Sandra.” So that’s the question. If it’s true that young adults have been programmed and pushed, should they be regarded as “contents under pressure?” Can we expect some of them to bail out suddenly and without apparent cause. Sometimes this will be a declaration that they can’t take the pressure anymore. Sometimes, it will be an act of personal protest.

As Daniel Bell pointed out, there are two conflicting individualisms at work in American culture: economic and expressive. People are quite happy to take up the challenges of economic individualism but when they believe that this challenge preempts the challenge of expressive individualism, they begin to act strangely. They just walk. They say to themselves things like, ‘this [football or college] can’t be everything, can it? What about me?”

Ricky Williams is an odd fellow, to be sure, but what if he’s also a harbinger?

References

Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.