Beauty in the ear of the behearer

The New Neo Posted on by

I still haven’t listened to Obama’s inaugural speech; don’t plan to. I’ve mentioned several times before that I don’t like speeches in general, unless they’re by Churchill or Lincoln (I guess Patrick Henry could sneak in there, too).

And Obama’s no Churchill. The funny thing is that he would like us to think he’s a Lincoln, and that many people do think so. These people tend to be (surprise, surprise) liberals and the left—not always exactly the same thing, but close enough for our purposes.

In the commentary on Obama’s address the split is massive, as one would expect when talking about a man who specializes in dividing the American public while talking about uniting it, a neat trick indeed. The right hears his combative, arrogant rhetoric, while the left hears a new assertiveness and confidence, and a determination to avoid struggling to compromise so hard anymore (!) with those intransigent, nasty Republicans.

Why would Obama feel more confident, rather than less, compared to 2008, when his mandate was much greater back then and has diminished since? Because, as was obvious, a second term frees him from the need to be beholden to the electorate. That is his triumph, and it is from whence his renewed confidence [arrogance] comes.

Those of you who are conservative and yet refused to vote for Romney for whatever reason no doubt have your ways of rationalizing that act (or failure to act). I’ve heard them all, and fought against them all, for at least a year. I continue to disagree about as strongly as possible, and it is with an especially heavy heart that I watch Obama begin his second term, thinking that his victory was achieved not only by the support of those who voted for him, but by the indirect support of those who failed to vote against him.

But I am not here to fight that battle any more; what’s done is done, and of course we’ll never know what sort of president Romney would have been (I believe a very good and also quite conservative one; your mileage may certainly differ). We can’t go back, we can only go forward; life’s not an alternate history book.

It puzzles me that so much of what I and many others see in Obama, those personal qualities that alarm us, are seemingly invisible to the vast majority of his admirers. It’s a bit like the ability to detect PTC by its bitter taste. Some have the trait and some don’t:

In 1931, a chemist named Arthur Fox was pouring some powdered PTC into a bottle. When some of the powder accidentally blew into the air, a colleague standing nearby complained that the dust tasted bitter. Fox tasted nothing at all. Curious how they could be tasting the chemical differently, they tasted it again. The results were the same. Fox had his friends and family try the chemical then describe how it tasted. Some people tasted nothing. Some found it intensely bitter, and still others thought it tasted only slightly bitter.

Soon after its discovery, geneticists determined that there is an inherited component that influences how we taste PTC. Today we know that the ability to taste PTC (or not) is conveyed by a single gene that codes for a taste receptor on the tongue. The PTC gene, TAS2R38, was discovered in 2003.

I don’t think the ability to detect bitterness in Obama is a mutation, but it almost seems as cut and dried. To his admirers, Obama’s a nice guy who’s been dealing with some difficult things. To me (and to many of you), in practically his every appearance he seems to radiate signals of narcissism, duplicity, insincerity, power hunger, and sheer nastiness. This has nothing to do with his race, although his supporters like to think that (or at least like to accuse the right of that). It’s funny, but Obama’s blackness is just not his most salient characteristic (or an important characteristic at all) for most on the right. Rather, it’s his personality and his politics.

But it’s actually much more than that. For the first time in my lifetime, anyway, I’ve seen a cult arise for a major political figure in America (that happened a little bit with Kennedy, too, but nothing like with Obama). Not only that, but the figure has been instrumental in personally nourishing and nurturing and encouraging that cult attitude mightily; perhaps that’s the most disturbing thing of all.

Not everyone who voted for Obama buys into the cult aspects, but enough do to make me very very worried about the future of this country, and that’s separate even from Obama’s politics. The adulation surrounding him, especially that of the press, is one of the most troubling aspects of his administration, and bodes ill for our future.

The wisdom of…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Michele Bachmann?

Bachmann, like Palin, has been relentlessly attacked and has become somewhat of a laughingstock. She does have a certain tendency to go off in ways that seem overblown and even absurd, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid, and it certainly doesn’t mean she isn’t correct a good deal of the time.

I’m sorry, but is James Fallows really this dumb?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or is he just pretending to be, and assuming we are?

Perhaps it’s a meaningless question, because it actually doesn’t matter in practical terms. But since I’m interested in what makes people tick, I still ask it.

What am I referring to? This:

[His inaugural address] was the most sustainedly “progressive” statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage.

I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations — mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now — well, it’s almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to use the power of the presidency on the causes he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term … no, he apparently does not…

More detailed parsing later, but this speech made news and alters politics in a way I had not anticipated.

It “alters” nothing. Anyone who didn’t see this coming from several miles (and at least three years) away has the judgment and observational powers of a bunch of rocks. I don’t usually speak that bluntly, but sheesh!

Plus, what’s up with this “it’s almost as if” business? There’s no “almost” and no “as if” about it.

Several years ago I wrote a post in which I predicted this. And believe me, I offer this not to show that I have any special prescience. It was actually rather obvious:

What Obama may be saying is merely this: I know I must pretend to be changing my ways because the people hate what I’ve been doing, and I’m up for re-election in 2012. So I’ll use my silver tongue to say I’ll change, and hope I won’t have to actually do anything (there’s that “hope and change” thing; it worked before). The people are stupid and gullible, and all I’ve done wrong so far anyway is to fail to sell myself better.”

That’s one possibility. Another is that Obama actually will move towards the middle, in deed as in word. But it will be a temporary feint, a move made to convince doubters that he’s gotten the message and changed his ways.

It need only be until the next election. If Obama can moderate himself enough to be able to point to a few small but real compromises with the Republicans, he won’t be losing much and he’ll be gaining a lot. The American people are a generally genial and forgiving (not to say trusting) lot, predisposed to like him, and by then he may indeed have rehabilitated himself in the eyes of enough voters that he will win his bid for re-election and even increase the Democrats’ Congressional representation.

And then, and then—voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?

One thing I was wrong about, though: Obama did it all without making compromises with the Republicans at all. With the heartfelt cooperation of the press, he managed to convince the American people he was compromising when he actually wasn’t. Nice.

[ADDENDUM: Ace reflects on what Obama is doing here, and whether he will succeed. I have to say that right now I’m less optimistic than Ace. Hope he’s correct, though, about Obama’s chances for success.]

[ADDENDUM II: Another observation: isn’t it interesting that Obama’s address today was so much more liberal than in 2009, when in fact his liberal mandate is so much less strong? Republicans have the House (which they didn’t in 2009), and of course his own margin of victory was considerably smaller this time around.

Doesn’t matter. He will do it because yes, he can.]

So, did you watch the inauguration?

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t.

Yesterday a friend asked me about it and I said, “Why punish myself?” Then I realized that was rather combative, because after all she’s a big Obama fan, so I softened it by adding that I almost never watch inaugurations, and in fact haven’t really watched one since Kennedy. And that happens to be true. It’s partly my dislike of speeches.

And why should I punish myself by watching Obama’s second inauguration? No real reason to do so. And I also wonder why it is that we have to have an entire second big bash, just like the first one, when presidents are elected to a second term. Can’t we just say the oath still holds until the next president is sworn in?

I do like to notice the fashions, though. Michelle looked really nice (yeah, don’t jump down my throat; she did). And I’m very glad to see she ditched the belt she had on earlier in the day. Wonder if her husband told her she looked better without it? If so, it was one of the few times he showed remarkably good judgment:

coatbelt

michelecoat

Inaugurations are opportunities for coat fashion to be admired. As for that JFK inauguration I remember so well, it seems like another century. Hey, it was another century, but in some ways it seems like even longer ago than that. There was the muff Mrs. Kennedy carried (it was a very cold day), and the top hat Jack initially wore as a nod to tradition:

kennedys

JFK did not like hats, and he took it off for his speech:

JFKhat

Note the morning coat. That’s what it’s called isn’t it? You don’t see many of those these days.

Provide, provide

The New Neo Posted on by

On one of the recent art threads, commenter “Smock Puppet” offered a link to a sculpture by Rodin entitled “She who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmiere”:

The sculpture ‘Celle qui fut la belle heaulmié¨re’ is also known as ‘The old Woman’, ‘The old Courtesan’ and ‘Winter’. In 1884-85, Rodin modeled it after a 82 year old woman named Caira , mother of an Italian model, because he was fascinated by the inevitable decline of human beings with its different mouldings of ugliness and personality. Like for the model of his ‘Man with the Broken Nose’, Rodin found that what we call “…commonly […] ugliness in nature can in art become full of great beauty. […] In art, only that which has character is beautiful. Character is the essential truth of any natural object.”

Here’s the piece itself:

rodin

The sculpture was associated with a poem by Villon about vanished beauty and age that begins (English translation):

“Ah, wicked old age
Why have you struck me down so soon?
[You] have stiffened me
so that I cannot strike
And with that kill myself!

When I think, alas! of the good times,
What [I] was, what [I] have become,
When [I] look at myself completely
naked
And I see myself so changed.
Poor desiccated thin, shriveled,
I nearly go mad!…

It probably works better in French, because I have to say that, in English, it’s not much of a poem. I much prefer the English poems I know that begin with the same theme but then take it in another direction.

The French poem is a lot more straightfroward; the woman mourns her lost youth. Okay, we get it. But here’s Yeats’ “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop,” which leads us into deeper territory:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

And then of course there’s Robert Frost, with his deeply cynical “Provide, Provide.” You may not quite recognize the Frost you know here. But it’s Frost, all right:

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew,
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

And why “Abishag”? This is why:

According to the Old Testament, Abishag…was a young woman of Shunem, distinguished for her beauty. She was chosen to be a helper and servant to David in his old age. Among Abishag’s duties was to lie next to David and keep him warm; however, David did not have sexual relations with her (1 Kings 1:4).

The theme of tempus fugit is a favorite one for art, and the beauty of the human body is a common exemplar. But clocks will sometimes do:

dali

As for old-fashioned still lifes, they almost always had such a theme, sometimes subtly expressed but sometimes clearly spelled out:

Virtually all still lifes had a moralistic message, usually concerning the brevity of life ”“ this is known as the vanitas theme ”“ implicit even in the absence of an obvious symbol like a skull, or less obvious one such as a half-peeled lemon (like life, sweet in appearance but bitter to taste). Flowers wilt and food decays, and silver is of no use to the soul. Nevertheless, the force of this message seems less powerful in the more elaborate pieces of the second half of the century.

Back then, when it was not unusual for people to die young, it didn’t take as much to remind people of the vanitas theme. They were well aware of it. Fortunately, we have greatly diminished the prevalence of scourges that used to kill younger people so readily, and we have even made old age begin much much older. But time still flies, does it not?

And no, I’m not in an especially morbid frame of mind today. It’s just that when I looked at the photo of Rodin’s “She who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmiere” (which I’d never seen before), Frost’s poem immediately popped into my mind. That’s how posts sometimes begin—with a connection between two seemingly disparate things.

Is there progress in art?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: There was a great deal of interesting back and forth in the comments section here about how art has developed over the centuries, and what our greater ability to create lifelike representational art means. That’s what sparked this post.]

There’s art I like better than other art, and art I don’t much care for. There’s good art and there’s shlock, and there’s even good art I like better than other good art.

But each style of art (except for some recent art that is little but a series of ironic statements or commentary) is a self-contained, fully-developed thing, at least when at its zenith. There are trends—for example, towards more realism for a while, and then away from it—but the best artists of each era were masters of a certain esthetic that characterized that particular era. Is one “better” than the other in some objective way?

The first time I ever saw reproductions of the Lascaux cave paintings from about 17,000 years ago, I was stunned by what I considered their sophistication of form and beauty and even elegance, and especially line. These were not “primitive” in any sense of the word that I could understand, except perhaps the medium (cave walls, ground natural pigments, limited palette) and subject matter. But otherwise it astounded me how these very early humans were able to conjure up the movement and the essence of an animal with just a few strokes, while illuminated by torchlight in a damp, dark underground hole.

Lascaux Cave Paintings - horse

lascaux2

You think it strange that I call them “sophisticated”? Do you think they look like children’s drawings? Well, not to me. They are deceptively simple, but not childlike. In Altamira, where the paintings have been dated to around 14,000 to 16,500 years ago:

The artists used charcoal and ochre or haematite to create the images, often diluting these pigments to produce variations in intensity and creating an impression of chiaroscuro. They also exploited the natural contours in the cave walls to give their subjects a three-dimensional effect.

The paintings were so astoundingly wonderful and of such “supreme artistic quality” that they initially were met with profound skepticism, and thought to be forgeries.

The cave paintings have long reminded me of these Chinese ones, although no one could ever call the latter primitive:

Chinesehorse

Note, by the way, that the Chinese artists have made the error (or was it an esthetic choice?) of artists everywhere (before photography, anyway) in painting the running horse with feet flying, the perception discussed here (it was only when a movie was made that the error was corrected). Here is a flying-footed horse from Lascaux (although I’m not sure if it’s showing the horse’s back feet to be completely off the ground):

horselascaux

And here is that very first film of a horse. Note that all four of the animal’s legs are off the ground at one point, but in a furled rather than outstretched position. However, the back legs then touch down while the front stretch out—very much as in the above cave painting, rather than the Chinese ones. Of course, as I said earlier, that does not mean the cave painting is better art:

Each type of art is complete in itself, with its own esthetic and purpose, and yet universal in its appeal. If the criterion for greatness is near-photographic lifelike resemblance, then of course later developments would be greater. That’s not my criterion, although others may differ. One sense in which I think later art is “greater” is in its tremendous variety of purpose, subject, and style—if “greatness” is measured in variety. I’m not so sure it is, however; when I look at those cave paintings, they seem undeniably great, although the artists focused on a very narrow number of themes and styles.

I’ll close with a relief I studied in my college Introduction to Art History class. I found it very memorable, and so I remembered it. It’s another animal, interestingly enough—the wounded lioness, an Assyrian work of the seventh century BC. Pretty realistic, and pretty great, and pretty early in time, although compared to those cave paintings its realism is positively futuristic:

lioness

Obama the never-ending politician

The New Neo Posted on by

This Investor’s Business Daily editorial points out that Obama’s number one goal in his second term is ” to do whatever it takes to destroy Republicans and win back Democratic control of the House in 2014, giving him two more years to enact his agenda without any GOP meddling.”

In a way, there’s nothing so remarkable about it. All presidents are politicians; how else could they get elected? And all presidents are members of a party, a group they are not only affiliated with, but one whose causes they wish to advance and whose power they wish to increase.

But Obama differs in the laser-like intensity of his focus on those goals, as well as the enormous and completely shameless disparity between his goals and his unifying, inclusive rhetoric.

I have never agreed with those who don’t think Obama is smart. On the contrary, I’ve always maintained that he’s very smart. It’s just that he’s smart about what interests him, which is not what we think a president should be interested in. What he’s especially smart about is getting power and keeping power, about politics, and about appealing to both the lowest and the highest parts of people simultaneously.

I just don’t care about Lance Armstrong’s confession

The New Neo Posted on by

Though you might say, “well, why are you writing a post about it, then?”

I never followed Armstrong’s career, although I certainly knew who he was and about the controversy that whirled around him; how could you follow the news at all and miss it? But if you’d asked me to pick him out of a lineup I couldn’t have done it.

I’ve never been especially interested in elite athletes and their lives, especially those in solitary sports such as long-distance running or cycling. It seems a rather odd thing to devote one’s life to (although each to his own): breaking a record just so it can be your name up there rather than someone else’s (oh yeah, and getting a load of money into the bargain).

Now, I do understand that people are ambitious, have personal goals, want to be the best, want to challenge themselves, all that jazz; and I have nothing against that endeavor. But there’s something about the monomaniacal pursuit of something that’s (to me, anyway) so essentially boring that I’m basically neutral about the entire pursuit.

Nevertheless, I happened to watch Armstrong’s interview with Oprah last night (so, now I could pick him out of a lineup). And he struck me as a very odd duck indeed, which is hardly surprising. His almost reptilian coldness and his sharp coiled tense internal energy were strangely at odds with his somewhat penitent words. Even he seemed to realize that.

Here’s a man whose eyes don’t smile even when his mouth does, which is not often. Of course, Armstrong is now in a situation where a person wouldn’t be expected to be at his warm fuzziest. But I don’t think Armstrong has a lot of warm fuzziness in him even at the best of times.

But that’s no surprise, is it? Look into this guy’s eyes and you will see he’s one of the most competitive people in the world. So, what would people expect from him? That he also be moral, kind, honest, empathic, respectful of others? His eyes would tell you otherwise. Although Armstrong’s victories were achieved by means of illegal doping, all his competitors were doping too, and you might say he must have been the best doper around as well as the best (or certainly one of the best) cyclists. You could give me all the red blood cells in the world and I wouldn’t be winning the Tour de France.

Armstrong betrayed a lot of people, including his children. In the only even slightly moving part of the interview, he talked about that. Saving his son from unknowingly lying in order to defend his father was what propelled Armstrong (according to Armstrong, anyway) to finally tell the truth (or whatever part of the truth he’s told so far; he may still be lying about certain aspects of the story).

“According to Armstrong” will forever after be a phrase with an implied asterisk after it. When a person has lied so consistently, blatantly, and unashamedly, how can he ever be believed again?

[NOTE: I realize I never did answer that first question: then why am I writing about it? Something about the guy’s off-putting coldness, some look in his eyes, grabbed my attention. He reminded me of the villain in “The Terminator.” And that’s not a good thing, although fortunately Armstrong has seen fit to channel his drive into cycling rather than terminating.]

Conventional leftist wisdom…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is neither conventional nor wise. But it seems to be running the show lately.

Case in point: you mean the Muslim Brotherhood’s not a reasonable and moderate group? Who woulda thunk it?

Everyone who thought about it and did a particle of research on the matter, that’s who.

Probably half of those espousing the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood” line were stupid. Half were ignorant. And half knew it wasn’t true and were pushing the “moderate” meme for their own reasons.

And yeah, I know that adds up to 150%. There’s some overlap there.

Rescue 911: toddler plunge

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another in my series of old “Rescue 911” segments.

I notice that these haven’t gotten much commentary here. I don’t know how many of you watch them, but I continue to find them fascinating as well as incredibly moving. I think one of the reasons is that, whenever possible, the show used the real people (the ones originally involved) in their re-enactments.

If you never watched the program you wouldn’t know that, and it may mean nothing to you anyway. But, having seen very many of these segments, I’ve long found it interesting how good most of the re-enactments are—how realistic, and how profoundly moving.

This one is no exception. My theory is that, for the non-actors involved, the re-enactment functions as a sort of psychodrama in which they’re not exactly acting but are instead actually reliving at least some of their original feelings, and that accounts for the series’ believability and power.

Question of the day: does Rush Limbaugh read neo-neocon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nah. I very much doubt it.

But this was a surprise—

Neo-neocon, yesterday:

There’s been a lot of speculation on what [Obama’s] ends might be [in pushing gun control right now]. I think there’s a multitude””but one of them is sticking it to the bitter clingers, and letting the latte crowd know he’s with them, whether the legislation they want gets passed or not.

Remember those bitter clingers, bitterly clinging to their guns and religion?…Now, I’m more akin in my own demographics to the San Franciscans than to the bitter clingers. But somehow I never got the memo about the latter. However, I run in circles that trash them enough to make me quite familiar with the prevailing attitude, which is that they are, to put it crassly, cretins out of “Deliverance,” and terrible racists to boot.

It doesn’t escape me that a great deal of the talk on blogs on the left lately is about the heinous “gun culture,” rather than anything more rationally related to murder or mass murder.

Rush Limbaugh, yesterday (hat tip: Legal Insurrection):

Aside from wanting everybody’s name on a list of some kind, why is Obama doing all of this? I mean, all of this is so in our face. Everything that people hold dear is under assault, deliberately making people upset. This is not what presidents do. Deliberately making people upset.

Maybe this is about revenge. You know, Obama used that word when he was on the campaign trail prior to the election. He told his supporters in Ohio to go vote and get their revenge. Revenge against who? Well, obviously, the people that disagree with Obama. But who are those people? He clearly knows who they are, and I think the root of this, I think the answer to my question can be found in the comment that Obama made when he thought he was off the record at a fundraiser in San Francisco, when he talked about the bitter clingers. These are people that the liberals all know. These are the not very bright people that want life to never change. They don’t want any progress…