May 29, 2002

Off the front burner... Michael

Off the front burner...

Michael Kelly takes the occasion of Memorial Day to deliver another "time to get serious" message and to reflect on the Sontag-istas once again, and on the futility of trying to respond to today's situations with yesterday's tired old tricks:

did you notice how absolutely irrelevant and inconsequential it all felt? One's lasting reaction was not outrage at all, but a mild embarrassment mixed with a strong sense of temporal dislocation, of the sort occasioned by catching a glimpse of Jerry Lewis on television. It is a sense of: You're still here? You're still talking? Why? The most obvious fact about the people who bravely-- oh, so bravely, so bravely-- dared to tell truth to power in the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and the Cosmic Review of Blah-blah, was how old they were.

Old, old, old. Also, tired, tired, tired... this is our Old Guard now.


The main thing that strikes me is how the Sontag Award season seems so distant and remote, even though it was in full bloom just a few months ago. As Kelly says, little outrage remains (and I speak as one who felt the outrage as keenly as anyone); just a curious surprise when you suddenly realize that the usual suspects seem to have crawled back into the woodwork almost as quickly as they re-emerged. There are still multiple daily outrages, of course; but they tend to come less and less from the hectoring of effete professors and the spokesmodels of quaint postmodernism. You hardly ever hear the question "why do they hate us?" except as irony or parody. Everyone now appears to have admitted, as some were saying all along, that it's a stupid, or at least an irrelevant, question when it comes to figuring out how to mount a defense against those who would destroy us. When the "we are to blame" answer is given nonetheless by this or that diehard cultural antiquarian, we no longer draw ourselves up, exclaiming "how dare you, sir?" Rather we tend to pat them on the head and say, "yes, very nice. Now, run along and play. The adults have to figure out what we're going to do about Iraq."

Or as Kelly puts it: "you can take seriously, or pretend to take seriously, the likes of Chomsky--or the likes of Gephardt--when you can afford to. But that sort of thing is a frivolity, of a grim sort, for a frivolous time."

Despite the gratuitous slap at Gephardt (who is hardly in the same category) he's right. I feel a bit guilty admitting it, but I believe I'm not alone: I kind of miss frivolity's brief reign. Never has it been so easy to be right about what was on the front burner in the culture war, as well as in the real war: all you had to do is pull a quotation from the latest column by the resuscitated dinosaur of the day, arm it with an ironic caption, and stand back to watch it self-destruct before the eyes of the reader. Of course, we've still got the Guardian. But generally, you have to work a little harder now. Anyway, it's amazing how quickly the nostalgia-go-round goes by.

(via Bill Quick)

Posted by Dr. Frank at May 29, 2002 11:14 AM | TrackBack