All That Jazz“The Great Gatsby.”by David Denby
May 13, 2013
from The New Yorker
When “The Great Gatsby” was published, on April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald, living high in France after his early success, cabled Max Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and demanded to know if the news was good. Mostly, it was not. The book received some reviews that were dismissive (“F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD,” a headline in the New York World ran) and others that were pleasant but patronizing. Fitzgerald later complained to his friend Edmund Wilson that “of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” For a writer of Fitzgerald’s fame, sales were mediocre—about twenty thousand copies by the end of the year. Scribners did a second printing, of three thousand copies, but that was it, and when Fitzgerald died, in 1940, half-forgotten at the age of forty-four, the book was hard to find.
The tale of Fitzgerald’s woeful stumbles—no great writer ever hit the skids so publicly—is suffused with varying shades of irony, both forlorn and triumphal. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, and no doubt his health would have declined, whatever the commercial fate of his masterpiece. But he was a writer who needed recognition and money as much as booze, and if “Gatsby” had sold well it would likely have saved him from the lacerating public confessions of failure that he made in the nineteen-thirties, or, at least, would have kept him away from Hollywood. (He did get a fascinating, half-finished novel, “The Last Tycoon,” out of the place, but his talents as a screenwriter were too fine-grained for M-G-M.) At the same time, the initial failure of “Gatsby” has yielded an astounding coda: the U.S. trade-paperback edition of the book currently sells half a million copies a year. Jay Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” and his exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failures. The strong, delicate, poetically resonant text has become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires.
In 1925, Fitzgerald sent copies of “Gatsby” to Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote thank-you notes that served to canonize the book when Wilson reprinted them, in “The Crack-Up” (1945), a miscellany of Fitzgerald’s writing and letters. All three let the young author know that he had done something that defined modernity. Edith Wharton praised the scene early in the novel when the coarsely philandering Tom Buchanan takes Nick Carraway—the shy young man who narrates the story—to an apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle, in Washington Heights. Wharton described the scene as a “seedy orgy.” With its stupid remarks leading nowhere, its noisy, trivial self-dramatization, the little gathering marks a collapse of the standards of social conduct. In its acrid way, the episode is satirical, but an abyss slowly opens. Some small expectation of grace has vanished.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisI thought of Wharton’s phrase when I saw the new, hyperactive 3-D version of “The Great Gatsby,” by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (“Strictly Ballroom,” “Moulin Rouge!”). Luhrmann whips Fitzgerald’s sordid debauch into a saturnalia—garish and violent, with tangled blasts of music, not all of it redolent of the Jazz Age. (Jay-Z is responsible for the soundtrack; Beyoncé and André 3000 sing.) Fitzgerald’s scene at the apartment gives off a feeling of sinister incoherence; Luhrmann’s version is merely a frantic jumble. The picture is filled with an indiscriminate swirling motion, a thrashing impress of “style” (Art Deco turned to digitized glitz), thrown at us with whooshing camera sweeps and surges and rapid changes of perspective exaggerated by 3-D. Fitzgerald wrote of Jay Gatsby, “He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Gatsby’s excess—his house, his clothes, his celebrity guests—is designed to win over his beloved Daisy. Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.
The mistakes begin with the narrative framing device. In the book, Nick has gone home to the Midwest after a bruising time in New York; everything he tells us of Gatsby and Daisy and the rest is a wondering recollection. Luhrmann and his frequent collaborator, the screenwriter Craig Pearce, have turned the retreating Nick into an alcoholic drying out at a sanatorium. He pulls himself together and, with hardly any sleep, composes the entire text of “The Great Gatsby.” He types, right on the manuscript, “by Nick Carraway.” (No doubt a manuscript of “Lolita by Humbert Humbert” will show up in future movie adaptations of Nabokov’s novel.) The filmmakers have literalized Fitzgerald’s conceit that Nick wrote the text—unnecessarily, since, for most of the rest of the movie, we readily accept his narration as a simple voice-over. Doubling down on their folly, Pearce and Luhrmann print famous lines from the book as Nick labors at his desk. The words pop onto the screen like escapees from a bowl of alphabet soup.
When Luhrmann calms down, however, and concentrates on the characters, he demonstrates an ability with actors that he hasn’t shown in the past. Tobey Maguire, with his grainy but distinct voice, his asexual reserve, makes a fine, lonely Nick Carraway. He looks at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby with amazement and, eventually, admiration. As Nick slowly discovers that his Long Island neighbor is at once a ruthless gangster, a lover of unending dedication, and a man who wears pink suits as a spiritual project, some of the book’s exhilarating complexity comes through. (The love between Nick and Gatsby is the strongest emotional tie in the movie.) DiCaprio, thirty-eight, still has a golden glow: swept-back blond hair, glittering blue-green eyes, smooth tawny skin. The slender, cat-faced boy of “Titanic” now looks solid and substantial, and he speaks with a dominating voice. He’s certainly a more forceful Gatsby than placid Robert Redford was in the tastefully opulent but inert adaptation of the book from 1974. DiCaprio has an appraising stare and he re-creates Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s charm: that he can look at someone for an instant and understand how, ideally, he or she wants to be seen.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Sandra's Regrets
May 7, 2013
Justice O’Connor Regrets
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court seven years ago, made some news the other day. In an interview with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, she expressed misgivings about one of the signature decisions of her judicial career: Bush v. Gore. “Maybe the Court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ” The case, she said, which effectively awarded the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, “stirred up the public” and “gave the Court a less than perfect reputation.”
It was not a full-fledged denunciation of the Court’s opinion, but it was a decided shift in O’Connor’s views. Ever since the decision in 2000, in which a five-Justice majority ended a recount of votes that had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, O’Connor has defended the result publicly. (She did so on “The Daily Show.”) I have heard O’Connor defend Bush v. Gore any number of times, at events ranging from law-school convocations to small dinner parties.
So what changed? The Republican Party—O’Connor’s Republican Party.
The Court, in its history, has had many Justices who formerly held elective office—Earl Warren, a former Governor of California; William Howard Taft, who’d been President; Hugo Black, a onetime Senator—but O’Connor was last to have done so. (She was a state senator in Arizona.) That experience has always been crucial to understanding her judicial philosophy. Temperamentally as well as politically, she was a Republican, to be sure, but she was a moderate conservative; even more than Ronald Reagan, the President who appointed her, George H. W. Bush was O’Connor’s ideal President. In the ballot box as well as on the Supreme Court, O’Connor voted for George W. Bush thinking that he would be a President much like his father. (The story of O’Connor’s election-night rooting for Bush in 2000 is well-known; I’ve told it in two books.)
As for the Presidency of the younger Bush, O’Connor was disappointed, to put it mildly. The story of the last decade or so of her life is the story of her increasing alienation from the modern Republican Party. The key moment for her was the Terri Schiavo case, in 2005, when the President and congressional Republicans mobilized overnight to intervene in the case of a Florida woman who was in a persistent vegetative state, and attempted to overrule her husband’s request to remove her feeding tubes. O’Connor, who was at that moment dealing with the descent of her own husband into Alzheimer’s disease, was appalled at the fanaticism on display. But largely because of her husband’s condition, O’Connor nevertheless announced her departure from the Court later that year—and gave George W. Bush the chance to put his stamp, and that of the modern Republican Party, on her beloved Court.
In the past seven years, O’Connor has been increasingly clear about her disenchantment with the work of her successors, especially Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., (who took her seat). She has been harshly critical of the Court’s decision in Citizens United, which revolutionized the law of campaign finance. Indeed, her major outside activity since retiring has been to try to persuade states to have a system of appointed, as opposed to elected, judges. A primary reason why O’Connor opposes judicial election is because of the influence of campaign contributions—which is, of course, precisely the kind of spending allowed by Citizens United.
It may be that O’Connor chose this moment to speak out because she knows (or suspects) that the Court is about to demolish one of her most important achievements. In 2003, O’Connor wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed the use of affirmative action in admissions in higher education. The decision was a classic O’Connor compromise: she supported diversity but not quotas; she embraced racial preferences but put a time limit on their use—twenty-five years. But now, just a decade later, the Court appears poised to undo, or at least limit, O’Connor’s decision. In the next month or so, the Justices will decide Fisher v. University of Texas, which is a direct challenge to Grutter. The prospect of a thwarted legacy focusses any retired Justice’s mind.
And O’Connor was not alone as a Republican Justice looking on with horror at what her party has become. The two Justices who left the Court after O’Connor were also Republicans who departed aghast at the modern Republican Party. David Souter and John Paul Stevens were so repulsed by the party of George W. Bush that they gave the most precious gift any Justice can proffer to his successor, Barack Obama—their seats on the Court. There is no more eloquent testimony to the evolution of the Republican Party than the ideological fate of the last three Justices to leave the Supreme Court: O’Connor, Souter, and Stevens. In this way, O’Connor’s apostasy on Bush v. Gore is a surprise—but perhaps only because it took so long.
Justice O’Connor Regrets
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court seven years ago, made some news the other day. In an interview with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, she expressed misgivings about one of the signature decisions of her judicial career: Bush v. Gore. “Maybe the Court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ” The case, she said, which effectively awarded the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, “stirred up the public” and “gave the Court a less than perfect reputation.”
It was not a full-fledged denunciation of the Court’s opinion, but it was a decided shift in O’Connor’s views. Ever since the decision in 2000, in which a five-Justice majority ended a recount of votes that had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, O’Connor has defended the result publicly. (She did so on “The Daily Show.”) I have heard O’Connor defend Bush v. Gore any number of times, at events ranging from law-school convocations to small dinner parties.
So what changed? The Republican Party—O’Connor’s Republican Party.
The Court, in its history, has had many Justices who formerly held elective office—Earl Warren, a former Governor of California; William Howard Taft, who’d been President; Hugo Black, a onetime Senator—but O’Connor was last to have done so. (She was a state senator in Arizona.) That experience has always been crucial to understanding her judicial philosophy. Temperamentally as well as politically, she was a Republican, to be sure, but she was a moderate conservative; even more than Ronald Reagan, the President who appointed her, George H. W. Bush was O’Connor’s ideal President. In the ballot box as well as on the Supreme Court, O’Connor voted for George W. Bush thinking that he would be a President much like his father. (The story of O’Connor’s election-night rooting for Bush in 2000 is well-known; I’ve told it in two books.)
As for the Presidency of the younger Bush, O’Connor was disappointed, to put it mildly. The story of the last decade or so of her life is the story of her increasing alienation from the modern Republican Party. The key moment for her was the Terri Schiavo case, in 2005, when the President and congressional Republicans mobilized overnight to intervene in the case of a Florida woman who was in a persistent vegetative state, and attempted to overrule her husband’s request to remove her feeding tubes. O’Connor, who was at that moment dealing with the descent of her own husband into Alzheimer’s disease, was appalled at the fanaticism on display. But largely because of her husband’s condition, O’Connor nevertheless announced her departure from the Court later that year—and gave George W. Bush the chance to put his stamp, and that of the modern Republican Party, on her beloved Court.
In the past seven years, O’Connor has been increasingly clear about her disenchantment with the work of her successors, especially Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., (who took her seat). She has been harshly critical of the Court’s decision in Citizens United, which revolutionized the law of campaign finance. Indeed, her major outside activity since retiring has been to try to persuade states to have a system of appointed, as opposed to elected, judges. A primary reason why O’Connor opposes judicial election is because of the influence of campaign contributions—which is, of course, precisely the kind of spending allowed by Citizens United.
It may be that O’Connor chose this moment to speak out because she knows (or suspects) that the Court is about to demolish one of her most important achievements. In 2003, O’Connor wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed the use of affirmative action in admissions in higher education. The decision was a classic O’Connor compromise: she supported diversity but not quotas; she embraced racial preferences but put a time limit on their use—twenty-five years. But now, just a decade later, the Court appears poised to undo, or at least limit, O’Connor’s decision. In the next month or so, the Justices will decide Fisher v. University of Texas, which is a direct challenge to Grutter. The prospect of a thwarted legacy focusses any retired Justice’s mind.
And O’Connor was not alone as a Republican Justice looking on with horror at what her party has become. The two Justices who left the Court after O’Connor were also Republicans who departed aghast at the modern Republican Party. David Souter and John Paul Stevens were so repulsed by the party of George W. Bush that they gave the most precious gift any Justice can proffer to his successor, Barack Obama—their seats on the Court. There is no more eloquent testimony to the evolution of the Republican Party than the ideological fate of the last three Justices to leave the Supreme Court: O’Connor, Souter, and Stevens. In this way, O’Connor’s apostasy on Bush v. Gore is a surprise—but perhaps only because it took so long.
From Facebook
There's nothing like having breakfast at your local Hardee's to feel young again. At 63 I felt like a young whippersnapper as I worked the dining room at the Vestavia Hardees's this morning. Surely I was the only customer under 70. I know how to work a senior crowd. It was fun this morning.
I am beginning to get worried. At this late stage in my life I have yet to receive my 15 minutes of fame. Time is running out. How much longer must I wait? Where are you, Andy Warhol?
This will be a zombie day. If you see me today, do not adjust your glasses. You will not be hallucinating. The silly grin on my face will be for real. The unfocused eyes will be for real. The aimless shuffle will be for real. The only unreal thing will be an occasional smirk. That's just for show.
I am beginning to get worried. At this late stage in my life I have yet to receive my 15 minutes of fame. Time is running out. How much longer must I wait? Where are you, Andy Warhol?
This will be a zombie day. If you see me today, do not adjust your glasses. You will not be hallucinating. The silly grin on my face will be for real. The unfocused eyes will be for real. The aimless shuffle will be for real. The only unreal thing will be an occasional smirk. That's just for show.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Hating The Great Gatsby?
Why I Despise The Great GatsbyBy Kathryn Schulz The best advice I ever got about reading came from the critic and scholar Louis Menand. Back in 2005, I spent six months in Boston and, for the fun of it, sat in on a lit seminar he was teaching at Harvard. The week we were to read Gertrude Stein’s notoriously challenging Tender Buttons, one student raised her hand and asked—bravely, I thought—if Menand had any advice about how best to approach it. In response, he offered up the closest thing to a beatific smile I have ever seen on the face of a book critic. “With pleasure,” he replied.
I have read The Great Gatsby five times. The first was in high school; the second, in college. The third was in my mid-twenties, stuck in a remote bus depot in Peru with someone’s left-behind copy. The fourth was last month, in advance of seeing the new film adaptation; the fifth, last week. There are a small number of novels I return to again and again: Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Pride and Prejudice, maybe a half-dozen others. But Gatsby is in a class by itself. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience.
I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation.
I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them—but not this book. So since we find ourselves, as we cyclically do here, in the middle of another massive Gatsby recrudescence, allow me to file a minority report.
The plot of The Great Gatsby, should you need a refresher, is easily told. Nick Carraway, an upstanding young man from the Midwest, moves to New York to seek his fortune in the bond business. He rents a cottage on Long Island, next to a mansion occupied by a man of mysterious origins but manifest wealth: Jay Gatsby, known far and wide for his extravagant parties. Gradually, we learn that Gatsby was born into poverty, and that everything he has acquired—fortune, mansion, entire persona—is designed to attract the attention of his first love: the beautiful Daisy, by chance Nick’s cousin. Daisy loved Gatsby but married Tom Buchanan, who is fabulously wealthy, fabulously unpleasant, and conducting an affair with a married working-class woman named Myrtle. Thanks to Nick, Gatsby and Daisy reunite, but she ultimately balks at the prospect of leaving Tom and, barreling back home in Gatsby’s car, kills Myrtle in a hit-and-run. Her husband, believing that Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle’s lover, tracks him to his mansion and shoots him. Finis, give or take some final reflections from Nick.
When this tale was published, in 1925, very few people aside from its author thought it was or would ever become an American classic. Unlike his first book—This Side of Paradise, which was hailed as the definitive novel of its era—The Great Gatsby emerged to mixed reviews and mediocre sales. Fewer than 24,000 copies were printed in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, and some were still sitting in a warehouse when he died, in 1940, at the age of 44. Five years later, the U.S. military distributed 150,000 copies to service members, and the book has never been out of print since. Untold millions of copies have sold, including 405,000 in the first three months of this year.
But sales figures don’t capture the contemporary Gatsby phenomenon. In recent years, the book has been reinvented as a much-admired experimental play (Gatz) and a Nintendo video game—“Grand Theft Auto, West Egg,” as the New York Times dubbed it. This Thursday, Stephen Colbert will host a Gatsby book club; the new movie opens Friday. If you need a place to take your date afterward and have $14,999 to spare, you can head to the Trump hotel, which is offering a glamorous “Great Gatsby Package”: three nights in a suite on Central Park West, a magnum of Champagne, cuff links and a tailored suit for men, and, “for the ladies, an Art Deco shagreen and onyx cuff, accompanied by a personal note from Ivanka Trump.” Car insurance is not included.
So Gatsby is on our minds, on our screens, on our credit cards, on top of the Amazon best-seller list. But even in quieter days, we never really forget Fitzgerald’s novel. It is, among other things, a pedagogical perennial, in part for obvious reasons. The book is short, easy to read, and full of low-hanging symbols, the most famous of which really do hang low over Long Island: the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock; the unblinking eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, that Jazz Age Dr. Zizmor. But the real appeal of the book, one assumes, is what it lets us teach young people about the political, moral, and social fabric of our nation. Which raises the question: To our students, and to ourselves, exactly what kind of Great Gatsby Package are we selling?
I will grant Fitzgerald this much: Somehow, in the five years between his literary debut and The Great Gatsby, he taught himself to write. This Side of Paradise is intermittently brilliant but terrifically uncontrolled. Gatsby, by contrast, is focused and deliberate: a single crystal, scrupulously polished.
It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter—a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door—Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.
Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: I give you Blood Meridian. But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.
Fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. This he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative expedience, and zero parts anything else—love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. Fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”
What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. Gatsby takes place over a single summer: three months, three acts, three chapters each, with a denouement—the car accident and murder—of near-Greek (but also near-silly) symmetry. Inside that story, almost everything in sight serves a symbolic purpose: the automobiles and ash heaps, the upright Midwest and poisonous East, the white dresses and decadent mansions.
Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero psychological motivation: Those are the genre conventions of fables and fairy tales. Gatsby has been compared to both, typically to suggest a mythical quality to Fitzgerald’s characters or a moral significance to his tale. But moral significance requires moral engagement: challenge, discomfort, illumination, or transformation. The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness.
Scott Fitzgerald was, in his own words, “a moralist at heart.” He wanted to “preach at people,” and what he preached about most was the degeneracy of the wealthy. His concern, however, did not lie with the antisocial behaviors to which the rich are prone: acquiring their wealth through immoral means, say (Gatsby manipulates the American financial system and dies a martyr), or ignoring all plights from which they have the means to protect themselves. Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder. Fitzgerald despised the rich not for their iniquity per se but for the glamour of it—for, in H. L. Mencken’s words, “their glittering swinishness.”
Yet Fitzgerald also longed to be a glittering swine himself, and acted like one anytime he could afford it. “All big men have spent money freely,” he wrote in a letter to his mother. Given the means, he was only too happy to drape Zelda in furs, buy up the local Champagne supply, and throw Gatsby-worthy parties. These conflicted feelings about wealth bled into his work—and in fiction, as in life, piety and swinishness pair poorly. On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy. The glittering swinishness, by contrast, sometimes serves him well: There’s a reason Gatsby contains the best party scenes in American literature. But when you combine the two—when you apply a strict moral code to the saturnalian society to which you are attracted—you inevitably wind up a hypocrite. Jonathan Franzen once described Gatsby as “the central fable of America.” If so, it is the fable of the fox and the grapes: a story about people who criticize precisely what they covet.
That’s an interesting tension, common to most of us and great fodder for fiction. But rather than explore it, Gatsby enacts it. As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit. Our position throughout is that of an innocent bystander. That’s also Nick’s role, so the perspective of the book becomes one of passive observation. He watches across apartments as affairs take place, across parties as fights break out, across the road where the dead Myrtle’s left breast flaps leerishly loose. Yet he never admits to collusion with or seduction by all the fabulous depravity around him. After it’s all over, he retreats to the Midwest and, figuratively and literally, tells his story from the safe remove of America’s imaginary moral high ground.
In This Side of Paradise, in many of his short stories, and especially in his nonfiction, Fitzgerald displays a quick and often mordant wit. Then, suddenly, that voice vanishes; The Great Gatsby might be the least funny book about rich people ever written. The British, who kick our ass at writing about class, know how useful a dash of humor is—how it can lift up or deflate, jostle or soothe, comfort or eviscerate. (In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.) In leaving that note out, Fitzgerald is not just making a stylistic choice, nor even just signaling his solemnity of purpose. He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-person sanctimonious. From the story of America’s self-consuming profligacy, corruption, and avarice, he omits himself and his moral proxy—and, by extension, us.
I can only sketch here the many other things that trouble me about Gatsby and its place in our culture. There is the convoluted moral logic, simultaneously Romantic and Machiavellian, by which the most epically crooked character in the book is the one we are commanded to admire. There’s the command itself: the controlling need to tell us what to think, both in and about the book. There’s the blanket embrace of that great American delusion by which wealth, poverty, and class itself stem from private virtue and vice. There’s Fitzgerald’s unthinking commitment to a gender order so archaic as to be Premodern: corrupt woman occasioning the fall of man. There is, relatedly, the travesty of his female characters—single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin. (Don’t talk to me about the standards of his time; the man hell-bent on being the voice of his generation was a contemporary of Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, not to mention the great groundswell of activists who achieved the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet here he is in A Short Autobiography: “Women learn best not from books or from their own dreams but from reality and from contact with first-class men.”)
I can’t say more here about any of these. But allow me, in its fullness, one last apostasy. Every time I read the book’s beloved final line, I roll my eyes. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”: What a shame that Fitzgerald wasted such a lovely image on such an insufferable voice. Even as that faux “we” promises intimacy, the words drift down to us from on high—condescending, self-serious, detached from genuine human struggle. I’m sorry, but in the moral universe of The Great Gatsby, we are not all in the same boat. We are all up above it, watching—with prurient fascination, with pious opprobrium, watching and watching and doing nothing at all.
I have read The Great Gatsby five times. The first was in high school; the second, in college. The third was in my mid-twenties, stuck in a remote bus depot in Peru with someone’s left-behind copy. The fourth was last month, in advance of seeing the new film adaptation; the fifth, last week. There are a small number of novels I return to again and again: Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Pride and Prejudice, maybe a half-dozen others. But Gatsby is in a class by itself. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience.
I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation.
I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them—but not this book. So since we find ourselves, as we cyclically do here, in the middle of another massive Gatsby recrudescence, allow me to file a minority report.
The plot of The Great Gatsby, should you need a refresher, is easily told. Nick Carraway, an upstanding young man from the Midwest, moves to New York to seek his fortune in the bond business. He rents a cottage on Long Island, next to a mansion occupied by a man of mysterious origins but manifest wealth: Jay Gatsby, known far and wide for his extravagant parties. Gradually, we learn that Gatsby was born into poverty, and that everything he has acquired—fortune, mansion, entire persona—is designed to attract the attention of his first love: the beautiful Daisy, by chance Nick’s cousin. Daisy loved Gatsby but married Tom Buchanan, who is fabulously wealthy, fabulously unpleasant, and conducting an affair with a married working-class woman named Myrtle. Thanks to Nick, Gatsby and Daisy reunite, but she ultimately balks at the prospect of leaving Tom and, barreling back home in Gatsby’s car, kills Myrtle in a hit-and-run. Her husband, believing that Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle’s lover, tracks him to his mansion and shoots him. Finis, give or take some final reflections from Nick.
When this tale was published, in 1925, very few people aside from its author thought it was or would ever become an American classic. Unlike his first book—This Side of Paradise, which was hailed as the definitive novel of its era—The Great Gatsby emerged to mixed reviews and mediocre sales. Fewer than 24,000 copies were printed in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, and some were still sitting in a warehouse when he died, in 1940, at the age of 44. Five years later, the U.S. military distributed 150,000 copies to service members, and the book has never been out of print since. Untold millions of copies have sold, including 405,000 in the first three months of this year.
But sales figures don’t capture the contemporary Gatsby phenomenon. In recent years, the book has been reinvented as a much-admired experimental play (Gatz) and a Nintendo video game—“Grand Theft Auto, West Egg,” as the New York Times dubbed it. This Thursday, Stephen Colbert will host a Gatsby book club; the new movie opens Friday. If you need a place to take your date afterward and have $14,999 to spare, you can head to the Trump hotel, which is offering a glamorous “Great Gatsby Package”: three nights in a suite on Central Park West, a magnum of Champagne, cuff links and a tailored suit for men, and, “for the ladies, an Art Deco shagreen and onyx cuff, accompanied by a personal note from Ivanka Trump.” Car insurance is not included.
So Gatsby is on our minds, on our screens, on our credit cards, on top of the Amazon best-seller list. But even in quieter days, we never really forget Fitzgerald’s novel. It is, among other things, a pedagogical perennial, in part for obvious reasons. The book is short, easy to read, and full of low-hanging symbols, the most famous of which really do hang low over Long Island: the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock; the unblinking eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, that Jazz Age Dr. Zizmor. But the real appeal of the book, one assumes, is what it lets us teach young people about the political, moral, and social fabric of our nation. Which raises the question: To our students, and to ourselves, exactly what kind of Great Gatsby Package are we selling?
I will grant Fitzgerald this much: Somehow, in the five years between his literary debut and The Great Gatsby, he taught himself to write. This Side of Paradise is intermittently brilliant but terrifically uncontrolled. Gatsby, by contrast, is focused and deliberate: a single crystal, scrupulously polished.
It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter—a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door—Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.
Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: I give you Blood Meridian. But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.
Fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. This he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative expedience, and zero parts anything else—love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. Fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”
What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. Gatsby takes place over a single summer: three months, three acts, three chapters each, with a denouement—the car accident and murder—of near-Greek (but also near-silly) symmetry. Inside that story, almost everything in sight serves a symbolic purpose: the automobiles and ash heaps, the upright Midwest and poisonous East, the white dresses and decadent mansions.
Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero psychological motivation: Those are the genre conventions of fables and fairy tales. Gatsby has been compared to both, typically to suggest a mythical quality to Fitzgerald’s characters or a moral significance to his tale. But moral significance requires moral engagement: challenge, discomfort, illumination, or transformation. The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness.
Scott Fitzgerald was, in his own words, “a moralist at heart.” He wanted to “preach at people,” and what he preached about most was the degeneracy of the wealthy. His concern, however, did not lie with the antisocial behaviors to which the rich are prone: acquiring their wealth through immoral means, say (Gatsby manipulates the American financial system and dies a martyr), or ignoring all plights from which they have the means to protect themselves. Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder. Fitzgerald despised the rich not for their iniquity per se but for the glamour of it—for, in H. L. Mencken’s words, “their glittering swinishness.”
Yet Fitzgerald also longed to be a glittering swine himself, and acted like one anytime he could afford it. “All big men have spent money freely,” he wrote in a letter to his mother. Given the means, he was only too happy to drape Zelda in furs, buy up the local Champagne supply, and throw Gatsby-worthy parties. These conflicted feelings about wealth bled into his work—and in fiction, as in life, piety and swinishness pair poorly. On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy. The glittering swinishness, by contrast, sometimes serves him well: There’s a reason Gatsby contains the best party scenes in American literature. But when you combine the two—when you apply a strict moral code to the saturnalian society to which you are attracted—you inevitably wind up a hypocrite. Jonathan Franzen once described Gatsby as “the central fable of America.” If so, it is the fable of the fox and the grapes: a story about people who criticize precisely what they covet.
That’s an interesting tension, common to most of us and great fodder for fiction. But rather than explore it, Gatsby enacts it. As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit. Our position throughout is that of an innocent bystander. That’s also Nick’s role, so the perspective of the book becomes one of passive observation. He watches across apartments as affairs take place, across parties as fights break out, across the road where the dead Myrtle’s left breast flaps leerishly loose. Yet he never admits to collusion with or seduction by all the fabulous depravity around him. After it’s all over, he retreats to the Midwest and, figuratively and literally, tells his story from the safe remove of America’s imaginary moral high ground.
In This Side of Paradise, in many of his short stories, and especially in his nonfiction, Fitzgerald displays a quick and often mordant wit. Then, suddenly, that voice vanishes; The Great Gatsby might be the least funny book about rich people ever written. The British, who kick our ass at writing about class, know how useful a dash of humor is—how it can lift up or deflate, jostle or soothe, comfort or eviscerate. (In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.) In leaving that note out, Fitzgerald is not just making a stylistic choice, nor even just signaling his solemnity of purpose. He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-person sanctimonious. From the story of America’s self-consuming profligacy, corruption, and avarice, he omits himself and his moral proxy—and, by extension, us.
I can only sketch here the many other things that trouble me about Gatsby and its place in our culture. There is the convoluted moral logic, simultaneously Romantic and Machiavellian, by which the most epically crooked character in the book is the one we are commanded to admire. There’s the command itself: the controlling need to tell us what to think, both in and about the book. There’s the blanket embrace of that great American delusion by which wealth, poverty, and class itself stem from private virtue and vice. There’s Fitzgerald’s unthinking commitment to a gender order so archaic as to be Premodern: corrupt woman occasioning the fall of man. There is, relatedly, the travesty of his female characters—single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin. (Don’t talk to me about the standards of his time; the man hell-bent on being the voice of his generation was a contemporary of Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, not to mention the great groundswell of activists who achieved the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet here he is in A Short Autobiography: “Women learn best not from books or from their own dreams but from reality and from contact with first-class men.”)
I can’t say more here about any of these. But allow me, in its fullness, one last apostasy. Every time I read the book’s beloved final line, I roll my eyes. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”: What a shame that Fitzgerald wasted such a lovely image on such an insufferable voice. Even as that faux “we” promises intimacy, the words drift down to us from on high—condescending, self-serious, detached from genuine human struggle. I’m sorry, but in the moral universe of The Great Gatsby, we are not all in the same boat. We are all up above it, watching—with prurient fascination, with pious opprobrium, watching and watching and doing nothing at all.
Left//Right Economics
Why Left and Right Economics Can’t Just AgreeBy Jonathan Chait 0 21
Don't hold your breath.
Adam Davidson writes a joint profile of Democratic economist Lawrence Summers and Republican economist Glenn Hubbard for The New York Times Magazine. The profile seems to be a lengthy attempt to find common ground between the two, which ultimately ends in the author throwing up his hands in befuddlement:
Before I met Summers and Hubbard, I had this little fantasy that I would get the two of them to agree, in my presence, to some sort of grand compromise that both parties might at least consider. Especially these two, trained around the same time, in the same place, to use the same analytical tools. Surely they could get their pencils out and come up with a tax-and-entitlement-reform plan that neither would find perfect but that would still be a huge improvement over what we have now. Yet both men took evident satisfaction in sticking to their guns, leaving me feeling the frustration that many do these days: Why can’t these two sides just work something out?
The premise of the story is that the two men are parallel, center-left and center-right, and both driven by data, which ought to suggest they can agree on the data. Davidson has no explanation for the failure of this agreement, which ought to signal that he’s looking at it the wrong way.
Let me supply my own theory, which might explain why the facts that Davidson observes but can’t fit together actually make perfect sense. One of my hobbyhorse ideas, which I wrote about at more length a while back, is that economic liberalism and economic conservatism are not mirror images of each other. Both have an interest in increasing human welfare, but economic conservatism is driven by deeper philosophical beliefs about the size of government in a way that liberalism is not. Liberals believe in bigger government as a means to the end of increasing human welfare — which is to say, how liberals interpret evidence about the effect of government on human welfare determines their stance. Conservatives believe in smaller government as a means but also as an end in and of itself. They consider bigger government a threat to freedom. There is no analogous philosophical liberal objection to smaller government (though of course liberals do have practical objections).
Davidson’s portrait of Hubbard, which generally accepts his self-definition as a data-driven economist, actually shows the opposite. Hubbard tells Davidson he came to his interest in economics by reading Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. That book warned that centrally planned economies would lead to tyranny. In fact, western governments abandoned central planning after World War II, but conservatives, including Hayek himself, simply transposed the generalized fear of government from central planning onto other forms of government intervention. According to Davidson, Hubbard’s current fear centers around rising federal debt:
Hubbard quickly zeroed in on the issue that has defined his career. In regard to the size of the government, Hubbard said the real challenge is the steady rise in so-called entitlement spending. Going forward, he said, government debt will rise partly on account of the increase in the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. …
In the end, it became clear that Hubbard sees many of our economic challenges — rising entitlements, inequality and even the financial crisis — as different manifestations of the same basic problem: unsustainable debt.
But this is self-evidently absurd, given Hubbard’s role in crafting Bush administration policies that transformed a budget that ran a surplus of 2.4 percent of GDP at its peak to one that ran a deficit of 1.2 percent of GDP at its peak. Debt is simply the current way Hubbard expresses his philosophical preference for smaller government. He argues that low taxes are vital for fast economic growth, but twenty years of recent experiences strongly suggest otherwise. (Higher marginal tax rates starting in 1993 coincided with rapid growth; lower tax rates from 2001–2012 coincided with much slower growth.)
My argument about the asymmetry of the liberal-conservative divide is often taken as a claim that conservatism is simply wrong. It’s not. I do obviously support the liberal side. But if you happen to share the conservative belief that big government impinges on economic freedom, then the conservative position makes perfect sense. That belief system is neither right nor wrong — it’s merely a value preference that you either share, or do not. But you have to understand that it exists if you want to understand why the two sides can’t simply agree.
Don't hold your breath.
Adam Davidson writes a joint profile of Democratic economist Lawrence Summers and Republican economist Glenn Hubbard for The New York Times Magazine. The profile seems to be a lengthy attempt to find common ground between the two, which ultimately ends in the author throwing up his hands in befuddlement:
Before I met Summers and Hubbard, I had this little fantasy that I would get the two of them to agree, in my presence, to some sort of grand compromise that both parties might at least consider. Especially these two, trained around the same time, in the same place, to use the same analytical tools. Surely they could get their pencils out and come up with a tax-and-entitlement-reform plan that neither would find perfect but that would still be a huge improvement over what we have now. Yet both men took evident satisfaction in sticking to their guns, leaving me feeling the frustration that many do these days: Why can’t these two sides just work something out?
The premise of the story is that the two men are parallel, center-left and center-right, and both driven by data, which ought to suggest they can agree on the data. Davidson has no explanation for the failure of this agreement, which ought to signal that he’s looking at it the wrong way.
Let me supply my own theory, which might explain why the facts that Davidson observes but can’t fit together actually make perfect sense. One of my hobbyhorse ideas, which I wrote about at more length a while back, is that economic liberalism and economic conservatism are not mirror images of each other. Both have an interest in increasing human welfare, but economic conservatism is driven by deeper philosophical beliefs about the size of government in a way that liberalism is not. Liberals believe in bigger government as a means to the end of increasing human welfare — which is to say, how liberals interpret evidence about the effect of government on human welfare determines their stance. Conservatives believe in smaller government as a means but also as an end in and of itself. They consider bigger government a threat to freedom. There is no analogous philosophical liberal objection to smaller government (though of course liberals do have practical objections).
Davidson’s portrait of Hubbard, which generally accepts his self-definition as a data-driven economist, actually shows the opposite. Hubbard tells Davidson he came to his interest in economics by reading Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. That book warned that centrally planned economies would lead to tyranny. In fact, western governments abandoned central planning after World War II, but conservatives, including Hayek himself, simply transposed the generalized fear of government from central planning onto other forms of government intervention. According to Davidson, Hubbard’s current fear centers around rising federal debt:
Hubbard quickly zeroed in on the issue that has defined his career. In regard to the size of the government, Hubbard said the real challenge is the steady rise in so-called entitlement spending. Going forward, he said, government debt will rise partly on account of the increase in the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. …
In the end, it became clear that Hubbard sees many of our economic challenges — rising entitlements, inequality and even the financial crisis — as different manifestations of the same basic problem: unsustainable debt.
But this is self-evidently absurd, given Hubbard’s role in crafting Bush administration policies that transformed a budget that ran a surplus of 2.4 percent of GDP at its peak to one that ran a deficit of 1.2 percent of GDP at its peak. Debt is simply the current way Hubbard expresses his philosophical preference for smaller government. He argues that low taxes are vital for fast economic growth, but twenty years of recent experiences strongly suggest otherwise. (Higher marginal tax rates starting in 1993 coincided with rapid growth; lower tax rates from 2001–2012 coincided with much slower growth.)
My argument about the asymmetry of the liberal-conservative divide is often taken as a claim that conservatism is simply wrong. It’s not. I do obviously support the liberal side. But if you happen to share the conservative belief that big government impinges on economic freedom, then the conservative position makes perfect sense. That belief system is neither right nor wrong — it’s merely a value preference that you either share, or do not. But you have to understand that it exists if you want to understand why the two sides can’t simply agree.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Should Democrats Dump Old Hickory?
Friday, May 3, 2013 10:48 AM CDT
It’s time for Democrats to ditch Andrew Jackson
As Biden speaks at event named for Old Hickory tonight, more appalling stories show party should dump him as icon
By Steve Yoder
Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And they’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina Democrats’ dinner tonight.
But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course.
Renowned journalist T.D. Allman’s gripping “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State” argues that brutality was a habit of mind for party icon Andrew Jackson long before he laid the groundwork, as president, for the Trail of Tears, the thousand-mile death march that killed 4,000 Cherokees in 1838−39.
Allman takes us back to July 1816 at a place called the Negro Fort in Florida’s Panhandle, the site of modern-day Fort Gadsden. Florida then belonged to Spain, and the area around the fort was home to Spanish-speaking black and Choctaw Indian farmers who had settled along the Apalachicola River with permission from the Spanish. Unfortunately for them, then-U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson hated the idea of a free colored community across the border that might serve as a magnet for runaway slaves.
So he invented a pretext for doing away with them, telling his subordinates they were villains bent on “rapine and plunder.” In reality, they were guilty of nothing more than raising crops, and Allman says no historian has ever produced a shred of evidence to the contrary.
No matter; Jackson illegally ordered troops into Spanish territory to destroy the fort, a wooden affair a little larger than a modern-day high school basketball court. Alerted to the attack and crowded into its walls for self-protection were about 330 civilians, more than 200 of them women and children. On July 27, 1816, Jackson’s troops attacked the fort, slaughtering 270 of them. Mainstream histories claim that a single cannon shot blew up the structure, though Allman finds that account hard to square with the evidence, calling it one of the worst massacres in U.S. history. Jackson’s forces then set off on a terror campaign along the river, kidnapping free blacks and marching them back into U.S. territory, where they turned them over to friends and associates to keep as slaves.
Jackson wasn’t finished with Florida. In 1819, with its power waning, Spain traded the territory to the United States as part of the Adams-Onís Treaty. Florida historian Canter Brown documents how Jackson, appointed Florida’s provisional governor in 1821, proceeded in short order to violate the treaty’s terms guaranteeing the rights and privileges of Florida’s free blacks. He had Native American allies launch a raid into western Florida to destroy the village of Angola, where black and mixed-race people lived, some of them descendants of escaped slaves. After razing the town, the allies seized 300 prisoners. No one knows exactly what happened to those captured, but Brown’s evidence indicates Jackson and the raid’s commander well may have profited personally by selling them back into slavery.
Seven years later, as president, Jackson would make way for the slave-based cotton empire in the South by forcing native tribes off their land. That he did so by violating the terms of his own Indian Removal Act, the precursor to the Trail of Tears, should matter at least a little. Indian tribes actually had the right under that law to voluntarily choose to give up their land in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, as University of Toledo history professor Alfred Cave demonstrated in a 2003 article in the journal the Historian. What the law didn’t authorize Jackson to do was precisely what he did — allow the Indians to be removed from their land at bayonet point.
But is it unfair to hold Jackson to today’s standards? It would be — had Jackson’s contemporaries not tried their best to stop him. Cave documents a campaign against Jackson’s Indian removal policy that continued throughout the 1830s; one signature petition from New York City was 47 yards long. From 1830 to 1842, 85 percent of opposition Whig Party congressional votes on removal were cast in opposition to Jackson’s policy, according to a 1993 journal article by historian Fred Rolater. And Allman describes an 1837 investigation by congressman William Jay concluding that Jackson’s destruction of the Negro Fort constituted an illegal use of taxpayer funds to support slavery.
Today, Democrats sound open to reconsidering whether honoring Jackson still makes sense. In Jackson’s home state of Tennessee, party spokesman Brandon Puttbrese says, “I think we welcome these kinds of conversations about our history. What he did in office … these are not things we should be proud of, but they’re definitely things we must learn from.” But if so, why keep Jackson as the party’s brand? “One explanation might just be inertia — it’s been that way forever, so it’s still that way,” says Puttbrese.
In Arkansas, party representative Candace Martin acknowledges that “If you look at the overall values of the Democratic Party, then Andrew Jackson probably would not be representative … It’s maybe something that we should be debating.”
And a Democratic official in one state who didn’t want to be named thinks Jackson’s days are numbered as a fundraising brand: “When I think of Andrew Jackson, I automatically think ‘Trail of Tears’ …” the official says. “If a bunch of people in my generation were creating this dinner, I don’t think we would name it the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. I think a lot of things that happen in politics are just like, ‘Well that’s the way it’s always been.’”
Mississippi party chairman Rickey Cole does offer a robust defense of Jackson, the namesake of that state’s capital. Cole argues that Jackson was committed to public investment, a value that carried through Democrats from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and today’s party leaders. And it was Jacksonians who got rid of the requirement that white men had to own property to vote, he says. “For that day, for that time, it was progressive,” Cole says.
But the historical record casts doubt on even those parts of Jackson’s legacy. His states’ rights, small-federal-government philosophy led him to veto much-needed federal money for transportation improvements like one extending the National Road in 1830. And Allman doesn’t buy the idea that Jackson’s expansion of suffrage to all white men eventually led to freedom for everyone else. That cover story papers over Jackson’s violent expansion of slavery into the Southeast, which dramatically strengthened the Southern slave powers and fueled the Civil War. “I don’t accept the argument that Jackson’s main contribution to history was expanding freedom,” Allman says. “His main contribution was expanding slavery.”
Should Jackson’s history matter to Democrats? If not, it’s hard to explain why Republicans went to such lengths before the presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 to paint themselves as the historic defenders of minority rights by recounting the crimes of Southern Democrats before the civil rights era. Today’s Democrats play into their hands by continuing to embrace Jackson; in the battle for minority votes, branding could prove to be the difference.
State parties have dumped Jackson before. In 1978, Minnesota Democrats renamed their Jefferson-Jackson dinner for Hubert Humphrey. Oklahoma Democrats replaced him with former Majority Leader Carl Albert in the 1990s. And in 2010, the North Dakota party picked legendary Sen. Quentin Burdick as the fundraiser’s namesake instead.
With Republicans also raising money with Lincoln-Reagan dinners this spring, Democrats have to take a harder look at what the past means for their future. If so, they’ll find it’s not hard to do better. Roosevelt-Kennedy has a nice ring to it.
It’s time for Democrats to ditch Andrew Jackson
As Biden speaks at event named for Old Hickory tonight, more appalling stories show party should dump him as icon
By Steve Yoder
Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And they’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina Democrats’ dinner tonight.
But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course.
Renowned journalist T.D. Allman’s gripping “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State” argues that brutality was a habit of mind for party icon Andrew Jackson long before he laid the groundwork, as president, for the Trail of Tears, the thousand-mile death march that killed 4,000 Cherokees in 1838−39.
Allman takes us back to July 1816 at a place called the Negro Fort in Florida’s Panhandle, the site of modern-day Fort Gadsden. Florida then belonged to Spain, and the area around the fort was home to Spanish-speaking black and Choctaw Indian farmers who had settled along the Apalachicola River with permission from the Spanish. Unfortunately for them, then-U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson hated the idea of a free colored community across the border that might serve as a magnet for runaway slaves.
So he invented a pretext for doing away with them, telling his subordinates they were villains bent on “rapine and plunder.” In reality, they were guilty of nothing more than raising crops, and Allman says no historian has ever produced a shred of evidence to the contrary.
No matter; Jackson illegally ordered troops into Spanish territory to destroy the fort, a wooden affair a little larger than a modern-day high school basketball court. Alerted to the attack and crowded into its walls for self-protection were about 330 civilians, more than 200 of them women and children. On July 27, 1816, Jackson’s troops attacked the fort, slaughtering 270 of them. Mainstream histories claim that a single cannon shot blew up the structure, though Allman finds that account hard to square with the evidence, calling it one of the worst massacres in U.S. history. Jackson’s forces then set off on a terror campaign along the river, kidnapping free blacks and marching them back into U.S. territory, where they turned them over to friends and associates to keep as slaves.
Jackson wasn’t finished with Florida. In 1819, with its power waning, Spain traded the territory to the United States as part of the Adams-Onís Treaty. Florida historian Canter Brown documents how Jackson, appointed Florida’s provisional governor in 1821, proceeded in short order to violate the treaty’s terms guaranteeing the rights and privileges of Florida’s free blacks. He had Native American allies launch a raid into western Florida to destroy the village of Angola, where black and mixed-race people lived, some of them descendants of escaped slaves. After razing the town, the allies seized 300 prisoners. No one knows exactly what happened to those captured, but Brown’s evidence indicates Jackson and the raid’s commander well may have profited personally by selling them back into slavery.
Seven years later, as president, Jackson would make way for the slave-based cotton empire in the South by forcing native tribes off their land. That he did so by violating the terms of his own Indian Removal Act, the precursor to the Trail of Tears, should matter at least a little. Indian tribes actually had the right under that law to voluntarily choose to give up their land in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, as University of Toledo history professor Alfred Cave demonstrated in a 2003 article in the journal the Historian. What the law didn’t authorize Jackson to do was precisely what he did — allow the Indians to be removed from their land at bayonet point.
But is it unfair to hold Jackson to today’s standards? It would be — had Jackson’s contemporaries not tried their best to stop him. Cave documents a campaign against Jackson’s Indian removal policy that continued throughout the 1830s; one signature petition from New York City was 47 yards long. From 1830 to 1842, 85 percent of opposition Whig Party congressional votes on removal were cast in opposition to Jackson’s policy, according to a 1993 journal article by historian Fred Rolater. And Allman describes an 1837 investigation by congressman William Jay concluding that Jackson’s destruction of the Negro Fort constituted an illegal use of taxpayer funds to support slavery.
Today, Democrats sound open to reconsidering whether honoring Jackson still makes sense. In Jackson’s home state of Tennessee, party spokesman Brandon Puttbrese says, “I think we welcome these kinds of conversations about our history. What he did in office … these are not things we should be proud of, but they’re definitely things we must learn from.” But if so, why keep Jackson as the party’s brand? “One explanation might just be inertia — it’s been that way forever, so it’s still that way,” says Puttbrese.
In Arkansas, party representative Candace Martin acknowledges that “If you look at the overall values of the Democratic Party, then Andrew Jackson probably would not be representative … It’s maybe something that we should be debating.”
And a Democratic official in one state who didn’t want to be named thinks Jackson’s days are numbered as a fundraising brand: “When I think of Andrew Jackson, I automatically think ‘Trail of Tears’ …” the official says. “If a bunch of people in my generation were creating this dinner, I don’t think we would name it the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. I think a lot of things that happen in politics are just like, ‘Well that’s the way it’s always been.’”
Mississippi party chairman Rickey Cole does offer a robust defense of Jackson, the namesake of that state’s capital. Cole argues that Jackson was committed to public investment, a value that carried through Democrats from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and today’s party leaders. And it was Jacksonians who got rid of the requirement that white men had to own property to vote, he says. “For that day, for that time, it was progressive,” Cole says.
But the historical record casts doubt on even those parts of Jackson’s legacy. His states’ rights, small-federal-government philosophy led him to veto much-needed federal money for transportation improvements like one extending the National Road in 1830. And Allman doesn’t buy the idea that Jackson’s expansion of suffrage to all white men eventually led to freedom for everyone else. That cover story papers over Jackson’s violent expansion of slavery into the Southeast, which dramatically strengthened the Southern slave powers and fueled the Civil War. “I don’t accept the argument that Jackson’s main contribution to history was expanding freedom,” Allman says. “His main contribution was expanding slavery.”
Should Jackson’s history matter to Democrats? If not, it’s hard to explain why Republicans went to such lengths before the presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 to paint themselves as the historic defenders of minority rights by recounting the crimes of Southern Democrats before the civil rights era. Today’s Democrats play into their hands by continuing to embrace Jackson; in the battle for minority votes, branding could prove to be the difference.
State parties have dumped Jackson before. In 1978, Minnesota Democrats renamed their Jefferson-Jackson dinner for Hubert Humphrey. Oklahoma Democrats replaced him with former Majority Leader Carl Albert in the 1990s. And in 2010, the North Dakota party picked legendary Sen. Quentin Burdick as the fundraiser’s namesake instead.
With Republicans also raising money with Lincoln-Reagan dinners this spring, Democrats have to take a harder look at what the past means for their future. If so, they’ll find it’s not hard to do better. Roosevelt-Kennedy has a nice ring to it.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Can We Please Stop Talking About TV?
BY John Jurgensen
Wall Street Journal
25 April 2013
When 21-year-old Stuart Goldberg went into a job interview last fall with a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the University of Pennsylvania senior expected to discuss his 3.8 grade-point average, his internships in private equity or the data-crunching he'd done for the Philadelphia Eagles. Instead, the interviewer went straight for a different bullet point on Mr. Goldberg's résumé: his interest in the cable-television series "Breaking Bad."
They spent 10 of the interview's 45 minutes discussing the dark drama about a high-school teacher who becomes a methamphetamine kingpin, Mr. Goldberg recalls. "I was shocked that he wanted to allocate so much time to that."
The candidate was also pleased that his strategic decision to represent himself with a "popular yet relatively highbrow" TV show had worked. He starts as a business analyst at McKinsey this summer, the consulting firm confirms.
Everywhere you go it seems as if all anyone wants to talk about is TV. Watching the boob tube used to be the couch potato's hobby, hardly a subject to trot out over cocktails. Now, that stigma has vanished, and a few knowing remarks about "House of Cards" can confer gravitas. Ever since fictional mob boss Tony Soprano had an existential crisis over the ducks in his swimming pool in 1999, viewers have been feasting on a growing bounty of high-quality dramas.
The result is that TV has infiltrated almost every setting, from dinner parties to the torrent of tweets on Sunday nights. That's when a glut of good shows air, causing twice the amount of TV-related activity on social media than on Mondays, the next busiest night. Major publications (including this one, which has a law professor and Supreme Court advocate leading a "Mad Men" discussion online) recap every plot development, even of ratings-challenged shows.
Some people are ready to change the subject. Art adviser Elizabeth Jacoby is a dedicated follower of "Suits" (USA), "Mr. Selfridge" (PBS) and "Shameless" (Showtime). But the vice president of New York consulting firm BSJ Fine Art has lost patience with certain shows that hog more than their fair share of discussion time among friends and colleagues.
"I begrudgingly read Plutarch for college, and I begrudgingly watched 'Girls' to know what all the fuss was about. But I don't want to talk about Plutarch, and I don't want to talk about 'Girls,' " she says, referring to the HBO series created by and starring Lena Dunham. The comedy, featuring lots of cringe-worthy sex, stifling jobs and frequent nude appearances by Ms. Dunham, made a big splash with critics and pundits that was disproportionate to its relatively puny viewership.
Recent months have seen additions to the ranks of obsessively watched shows, including FX's "The Americans," about married Soviet spies embedded in an American suburb at the peak of the Cold War, and, on the frothier side, ABC's "Scandal," a series about a Washington fixer that goes to outlandish lengths to live up to its title.
Throughout the year, networks (and now upstarts like streaming-media services) are rolling out series that seem meaty enough to merit at least a first round of sampling and debate. This week, the Sundance Channel introduced "Rectify," a simmering drama about a man released into his small hometown after 20 years in prison for a heinous crime. On May 26, Netflix will unveil 15 new episodes of a densely woven comedy that disappeared from network TV seven years ago, "Arrested Development."
A new halo of prestige now floats over serialized dramas. Recently the Paris Review, the 60-year-old literary journal whose "Writers at Work" feature has included Capote, Hemingway and Nabokov, commissioned the first-ever interview in that series with a television writer: Matthew Weiner, creator of "Mad Men."
"The stuff is art," says editor Lorin Stein. He still doesn't own a TV set. ("The day is short. I love to read.") But the 40-year-old has polished off a select group of series on his computer or with friends. To discuss, say, the themes of masculinity in the moody FX comedy "Louie" is an instinctive part of the experience, he says.
"Social TV" is the term for the real-time conversations happening online, and that's a major force keeping serial shows at the forefront. According to Trendrr, a company that tracks social-media activity around TV, the top 10 most-discussed dramas include young, soapy fare like "Pretty Little Liars" (ABC Family) and "The Vampire Diaries" (the CW). Topping the pack so far this year is HBO's epic fantasy series "Game of Thrones," with an average 777,000 social-media interactions on days an episode first airs. By comparison, the Daytona 500 broadcast on Feb. 24 had 704,000.
Intellectuals have long dismissed TV, except as a lens through which to study the masses. Bridgette Alexander, a Chicago-based expert in 19th-century French art history and philosophical culture, used to hide her TV habit from her scholarly friends like "a rendezvous with a secret lover," she says. "Now the conversation has shifted."
Thanks to shows like HBO's "True Blood," which enabled her to pipe up about political identity in the relationship between vampires and humans, TV themes are now routinely dissected on Ms. Alexander's party circuit. Over appetizers her friends have analyzed how Kevin Spacey's character in Netflix's "House of Cards" adapts the Brechtian strategy of breaking the "fourth wall"—speaking to the audience directly as if from a three-walled stage. The group includes a political scientist, the head of an African-American studies department, an English professor and a former city attorney. "These are the people who would say 10 years ago, 'I don't watch television,' " Ms. Alexander says.
Her husband, David Alexander, mostly sticks to the "Masterpiece" series on PBS (though he quit "Downton Abbey" after one season because it was "too superficial"). He says he doesn't object to the TV repartee at parties, but there have been times he privately urged his wife to rein it in.
A whole category of etiquette has sprung up around the way people discuss TV (both in person and online) when they're all working through the same group of shows at different speeds. The stars of the IFC comedy "Portlandia" satirized the social booby-traps in a sketch featuring two couples who ruin everything from "Dexter" to "Star Wars" for each other by blabbing crucial plot points. The clip itself, widely disseminated online, is preceded by a spoiler warning.
Serialized programs that unfold over multiple seasons give viewers more time to develop relationships with their characters. That's making these shows seem more "culturally crucial" than stand-alone entertainment like movies or books, says Daniel Menaker, a former top editor at Random House and HarperCollins, and author of a guide to conversation, "A Good Talk." Except for fluke blockbusters like "50 Shades of Grey," he says, "I don't hear a commonality in the books people talk about."
When Brendan Francis Newnam goes to dinner with friends in New York, he grows wary when the talk locks on television, a subject that can become "a kudzu vine that strangles out other conversations."
He's no snob—he devours shows like "Mad Men" and "Enlightened," and with Rico Gagliano hosts a public-radio show called "The Dinner Party Download," an omnivorous guide to arts and culture that broadcasts nationally. But Mr. Newnam recalls several gatherings that bogged down when fans of a show he doesn't watch, "Breaking Bad," waxed on about Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and other complex characters. "It's like they were talking about friends from high school, but I went to a different high school," he says.
Still, Mr. Newnam says he prefers talk of TV minutiae to that of viral videos, which often cause guests to whip out phones and laptops so they can compare YouTube clips. "When that happens," he says, "we might as well be eating frozen TV dinners by ourselves."
Wall Street Journal
25 April 2013
When 21-year-old Stuart Goldberg went into a job interview last fall with a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the University of Pennsylvania senior expected to discuss his 3.8 grade-point average, his internships in private equity or the data-crunching he'd done for the Philadelphia Eagles. Instead, the interviewer went straight for a different bullet point on Mr. Goldberg's résumé: his interest in the cable-television series "Breaking Bad."
They spent 10 of the interview's 45 minutes discussing the dark drama about a high-school teacher who becomes a methamphetamine kingpin, Mr. Goldberg recalls. "I was shocked that he wanted to allocate so much time to that."
The candidate was also pleased that his strategic decision to represent himself with a "popular yet relatively highbrow" TV show had worked. He starts as a business analyst at McKinsey this summer, the consulting firm confirms.
Everywhere you go it seems as if all anyone wants to talk about is TV. Watching the boob tube used to be the couch potato's hobby, hardly a subject to trot out over cocktails. Now, that stigma has vanished, and a few knowing remarks about "House of Cards" can confer gravitas. Ever since fictional mob boss Tony Soprano had an existential crisis over the ducks in his swimming pool in 1999, viewers have been feasting on a growing bounty of high-quality dramas.
The result is that TV has infiltrated almost every setting, from dinner parties to the torrent of tweets on Sunday nights. That's when a glut of good shows air, causing twice the amount of TV-related activity on social media than on Mondays, the next busiest night. Major publications (including this one, which has a law professor and Supreme Court advocate leading a "Mad Men" discussion online) recap every plot development, even of ratings-challenged shows.
Some people are ready to change the subject. Art adviser Elizabeth Jacoby is a dedicated follower of "Suits" (USA), "Mr. Selfridge" (PBS) and "Shameless" (Showtime). But the vice president of New York consulting firm BSJ Fine Art has lost patience with certain shows that hog more than their fair share of discussion time among friends and colleagues.
"I begrudgingly read Plutarch for college, and I begrudgingly watched 'Girls' to know what all the fuss was about. But I don't want to talk about Plutarch, and I don't want to talk about 'Girls,' " she says, referring to the HBO series created by and starring Lena Dunham. The comedy, featuring lots of cringe-worthy sex, stifling jobs and frequent nude appearances by Ms. Dunham, made a big splash with critics and pundits that was disproportionate to its relatively puny viewership.
Recent months have seen additions to the ranks of obsessively watched shows, including FX's "The Americans," about married Soviet spies embedded in an American suburb at the peak of the Cold War, and, on the frothier side, ABC's "Scandal," a series about a Washington fixer that goes to outlandish lengths to live up to its title.
Throughout the year, networks (and now upstarts like streaming-media services) are rolling out series that seem meaty enough to merit at least a first round of sampling and debate. This week, the Sundance Channel introduced "Rectify," a simmering drama about a man released into his small hometown after 20 years in prison for a heinous crime. On May 26, Netflix will unveil 15 new episodes of a densely woven comedy that disappeared from network TV seven years ago, "Arrested Development."
A new halo of prestige now floats over serialized dramas. Recently the Paris Review, the 60-year-old literary journal whose "Writers at Work" feature has included Capote, Hemingway and Nabokov, commissioned the first-ever interview in that series with a television writer: Matthew Weiner, creator of "Mad Men."
"The stuff is art," says editor Lorin Stein. He still doesn't own a TV set. ("The day is short. I love to read.") But the 40-year-old has polished off a select group of series on his computer or with friends. To discuss, say, the themes of masculinity in the moody FX comedy "Louie" is an instinctive part of the experience, he says.
"Social TV" is the term for the real-time conversations happening online, and that's a major force keeping serial shows at the forefront. According to Trendrr, a company that tracks social-media activity around TV, the top 10 most-discussed dramas include young, soapy fare like "Pretty Little Liars" (ABC Family) and "The Vampire Diaries" (the CW). Topping the pack so far this year is HBO's epic fantasy series "Game of Thrones," with an average 777,000 social-media interactions on days an episode first airs. By comparison, the Daytona 500 broadcast on Feb. 24 had 704,000.
Intellectuals have long dismissed TV, except as a lens through which to study the masses. Bridgette Alexander, a Chicago-based expert in 19th-century French art history and philosophical culture, used to hide her TV habit from her scholarly friends like "a rendezvous with a secret lover," she says. "Now the conversation has shifted."
Thanks to shows like HBO's "True Blood," which enabled her to pipe up about political identity in the relationship between vampires and humans, TV themes are now routinely dissected on Ms. Alexander's party circuit. Over appetizers her friends have analyzed how Kevin Spacey's character in Netflix's "House of Cards" adapts the Brechtian strategy of breaking the "fourth wall"—speaking to the audience directly as if from a three-walled stage. The group includes a political scientist, the head of an African-American studies department, an English professor and a former city attorney. "These are the people who would say 10 years ago, 'I don't watch television,' " Ms. Alexander says.
Her husband, David Alexander, mostly sticks to the "Masterpiece" series on PBS (though he quit "Downton Abbey" after one season because it was "too superficial"). He says he doesn't object to the TV repartee at parties, but there have been times he privately urged his wife to rein it in.
A whole category of etiquette has sprung up around the way people discuss TV (both in person and online) when they're all working through the same group of shows at different speeds. The stars of the IFC comedy "Portlandia" satirized the social booby-traps in a sketch featuring two couples who ruin everything from "Dexter" to "Star Wars" for each other by blabbing crucial plot points. The clip itself, widely disseminated online, is preceded by a spoiler warning.
Serialized programs that unfold over multiple seasons give viewers more time to develop relationships with their characters. That's making these shows seem more "culturally crucial" than stand-alone entertainment like movies or books, says Daniel Menaker, a former top editor at Random House and HarperCollins, and author of a guide to conversation, "A Good Talk." Except for fluke blockbusters like "50 Shades of Grey," he says, "I don't hear a commonality in the books people talk about."
When Brendan Francis Newnam goes to dinner with friends in New York, he grows wary when the talk locks on television, a subject that can become "a kudzu vine that strangles out other conversations."
He's no snob—he devours shows like "Mad Men" and "Enlightened," and with Rico Gagliano hosts a public-radio show called "The Dinner Party Download," an omnivorous guide to arts and culture that broadcasts nationally. But Mr. Newnam recalls several gatherings that bogged down when fans of a show he doesn't watch, "Breaking Bad," waxed on about Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and other complex characters. "It's like they were talking about friends from high school, but I went to a different high school," he says.
Still, Mr. Newnam says he prefers talk of TV minutiae to that of viral videos, which often cause guests to whip out phones and laptops so they can compare YouTube clips. "When that happens," he says, "we might as well be eating frozen TV dinners by ourselves."
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