A Miscellany for the Beginning of June
Santa Own’d
holy shit oh man hahaha amazing
Often in the last decade or so, I’ve been struck by how poorly my aesthetic instincts serve me when I’m trying to make sense of the actions, and more than that the psychology, of powerful people and institutions. I hate reading novels in which everybody is one-dimensionally silly and venal; I think such novels are not just dull and predictable, but bad maps of reality. Then I pick up the paper and it’s a bunch of stock villains screwing each other and the rest of us. The conflict is easily resolved, of course: I think that we are all born four-dimensional, and we are all constantly tempted to scale ourselves down, to believe any of the various stories about what people are really like and how the world necessarily works that the world offers us1, to think Satan’s thoughts after him as mediated by some institution or way of life that offers us these thoughts as a comprehensive vision of reality, and that the more we give in to these temptations the more of our own complexity we ignore and destroy. We become more like the story we are telling ourselves about what people are and what life is. We can’t fully efface the imago dei but we can sure as hell try. This is why the best novels have both round and flat characters, I guess — it’s possible to flatten yourself.
In fact, if you haven’t flattened yourself, you should consider it a mercy, not an accomplishment. Moral luck is real.
Anyway, it’s funny that a University of Michigan President has, twice in five years, acted out two different variations on a skit surely older than Menander, which could be called “Careerism Doesn’t Pay.” The last Michigan President to thus humiliate himself was Mark Schlissel. Now Santa Ono joins him. Both these gentlemen must be thanked for the example that they are providing to a group of students who, being genuinely smart and accomplished, and growing up in a churning and unpredictable world, are sharply tempted by careerism. It’s not worth it! Just as there’s no living in this world without compromise, there is also nothing to compromise about if you give it all away.
Comparing the two versions of “Careerism Doesn’t Pay,” the Ono variation has a harsher bite to it. It’s acrid. A guy comes to a university, takes a lot of selfies, promises an era of Good Feelings and then cracks down hard on students who take the correct position on genocides (which is “against”). Then an anti-intellectual demagogue with clear dictatorial intentions wins an election, and our main character goes to Florida in search of boots to lick. Schlissel, in retrospect, presents the spectacle of a man failing to suppress his personality completely: he falls for a subordinate and seeks to tempt her with knishes. If we use the works of a great satirist like Armando Ianucci as an analogy, then “Careerism Doesn’t Pay: Ono’s Version” is more like The Thick of It or Death of Stalin, where there’s really nobody to root for, and less like Veep, where we occasionally get some hint that Selina Mayer was once a person (as when she cries over a soldier who has lost his legs in an operation she authorized). To use another analogy, the Ono story is Early Evelyn Waugh and the Schlissel version is Later Evelyn Waugh.
I would love to offer some sort of Insider Dish as to which president sucked more. I am not nearly important enough or close to any form of The Action to say, really. When my union negotiated under Schlissel, his style was to cave on something truly substantial somewhere between 12:05AM and 2AM the night before a strike. It became as recognizable as a drummer’s sense of time, that Schlissel Cave. Ono would keep things going a lot longer, but the picture we’re getting of his overall leadership style — some of the recent news stories describe regents struggling to get ahold of him over this or that critical point — suggests that this was not because of his steely resolve but because he was probably out to lunch and indecisive. In practice — so I would guess, at least — this usually left the harshest people at the next level down in control.
It’s important to reiterate that none of the central players in this drama are “good guys.” I was happy when some of the regents signed that anti-Trump letter recently, but regents were also among those clamoring to get rid of all our DEI programs, and I strongly suspect that the impetus to use the state Attorney General as a weapon in the fight against pro-Palestinian protestors came mostly or entirely from them. Which is not even to say that the regents have nothing to complain about — if you vandalized my home, whatever you’re protesting, I’d be pissed too, less about the vandalism than the implicit “Next time it’s your body” message. I just don’t think you need to drag in the Attorney General. In any case, there was no reason to shut down a peaceful encampment composed of people who aren’t dumbasses and didn’t vandalize your home or frighten your children. That encampment was safer and friendlier than any football crowd or frat party on this campus. (Meanwhile, as we talk vandalism and prosecutions, Israel opens aid stations just long enough to shoot starving people and proclaims that it is “finally going to conquer the Gaza Strip.” It’s grimly funny that people still back away from the term “genocide”!)
Also Regarding University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.
The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Tanenhausmas
How did you celebrate Tanenhausmas? I was tempted to write Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell my congratulations, but then I realized their inboxes were probably already full of smartasses who’d done the same thing. So I just went for a long jog and got through the first four chapters of the audiobook right away.
(For those of you wondering what the hell I’m talking about: Sam Tanenhaus’s massive biography of William F. Buckley, years in the making, dropped on Tuesday. “Why do you, Phil Christman, a leftist who has at various times likened William F. Buckley to a bad case of syphilis and to the ‘Doctor Who’ villain known as Davros, care about this book?” Because I respect the art of biography, OK? More seriously, Buckley, like Nixon or Attilah the Hun, is a rich subject for that sort of attention, and anybody who heard Tanenhaus talk about his work in progress knew that this is gonna be amazing.)
My first reaction is that if William F. Buckley had had a semi-crippling case of asthma, like Proust, one that confined him to the cork-lined upper level of a fussy little rich boy apartment, and if his main contribution to the world had been an eccentric eight-volume novel about his weird childhood, I’d like him a lot better. Obviously he couldn’t have competed with Proust — nobody has ever seriously competed with Proust. And he wouldn’t have wanted to compete with Prout anyway, given his entire family’s feelings about Jewish people — there’s some stuff here that shocked even me. (He claimed to have outgrown those feelings, just as he claimed to have driven away the Bircherites from the conservative movement. He was a great bullshitter!) But Buckley the autofictionist might have made a positive contribution to the world. There was a moment where he was getting sent off to boarding school and his mom was pregnant with her eleventeenth child (the last child having almost killed her) and I was sure his mom was going to die in childbirth, and I really felt for the man for like two seconds. I was like, “Don’t die, Buckley’s mom!” (She didn’t.)
I take it that one of literature’s functions is to fully explore, without apology, those possibilities of the human personality that must never achieve large-scale political expression because they are evil and lethal and will kill other people or seriously blight their lives. Kept on the page, they help us understand what we are. I assume this is why Philip Roth can enjoy Celine, for example, or why Gloria Steinem could stand to read (along with other verbs) Norman Mailer.
“Christian Public Intellectualism”: What Little I Know
A couple weeks ago I was invited to do a couple workshops on essay writing with Christian undergraduates from various schools. I had a wonderful time; can’t speak for the students. Anyway, for those workshops, I put together a few handouts. This is an expanded version of one of them:
—In your intellectual life, expect God to defend himself. You don’t need to do it by avoiding books or topics that might challenge your faith. Fear your own unfaithfulness, but do not feel other people’s disbelief.
—Find enchantment, do not set up a bulwark in defense of it. There is no such thing as “disenchantment.” There is such a thing as destruction, but you can’t live in a world that isn’t miraculously and inexplicably instinct with unexpected life because such a world is the only world there is. That’s why we should stop destroying it.
—Regularly explain what you’re doing in detail to a member of your family who genuinely cares about you and genuinely isn’t into any of this stuff. (Thanks, mom!)
—A lot of Christian churches and other places cultivate a persecution complex that is often premature when not outright delusional. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. It’s better to be disappointed by other people’s small-mindedness about your faith than to talk around it.
—The source of your value-add — the thing you bring to the “secular” table as a Christian intellectual — and the thing that allows your writing to invite others to encounter Jesus is the same: You should show, in your arguments, that a Christian understanding of your topic allows you to say something both more and more generous than what other people can say about it.
—Pastors who think theologically, and theologians who think pastorally, are your indispensable allies in this work. They literally show you how to do it. A good pastor pops up at least several times a month with a short essay directed at multiple publics that restates some bit of the Nicene Creed in a way that will actually strike people as new again. The scholarly, the poetic, the expository, and the journalistic mode are all often blended in a sermon, along with heaven knows what else. (Most pastors don’t live up to this description; when you meet one who does, apprentice yourself.)
—”Knowledge puffeth up,” but only if you hoard it. If you believe that there’s nothing you know that you can’t, with a little time, explain to any mildly curious adult, and if you look for ways to use whatever you know to help (or just entertain) other people, you can avoid the arrogance that Paul warns us against. I hope.
—This should go without saying but doesn’t: if thinkers from other religious and spiritual traditions want to be friends with you, you should take that as a big honor. If, in particular, a Wiccan, Muslim, or Jew is nice to you, you should approach that friendship very humbly, because people carrying a Jesus license have done unspeakable things to those people specifically. Look for ever more refined and generous theories of the differences between you and them, not for easy and obvious ways that they’re your foils.
—With all that, you should still be hoping, in some sense, to be participating in God’s transformation of other people — in, yes, conversion. Starting with your own.
“In this big game that we play, life, it's not what you hope for, it's not what you deserve, it's what you take.” “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.” “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” “Ethics has to recognize the truth, recognized in unethical thought, that egoism comes before altruism.” “The church is a business.” “There is no such thing as society.” And on and on. Every subculture, however progressive, has its own versions.
phil i needed this, thank you and i love you