Category: Culture

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Disengagement from the Political

William Hogarth, The Humours of an Election, 1755

Looking over the back issues of this blog I realized how much political writing I’ve inflicted on you. Much of that dealt with topics other than Trump whom I tried to avoid after going at him full bore in a former blog, jazzinsideandout.com, now deleted. Yet, as for many of us, he became a near obsession for me that has persisted into recent years.

I also wrote speeches and coached a lot of political folks over time so that, in a way, politics became a real passion. Now I feel trapped in the political world Trump et al. have created, obsessing over the insistent daily news reports of indictments, trials, MAGA defectors, poll numbers, mass delusions and conspiracies, Republican collapse, all of it. With elections looming in a year, this stuff has recently gotten much more insidious and virulent. Politics right now is sickening.

Many of us must feel like we’re locked inside some mad media carnival of craziness, powerless to escape. For breakfast we get fried pickles and funnel cake served up by WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin; then comes a later ride on the CNN Tilt-A-Whirl, where the same stories go up and down, round and round daily.

The Democrats are also victims of their own madness. They refuse to confront the real issues the public is concerned about. Like Biden’s age which worries some 77% of voters, while two-thirds want somebody else to run. The government glosses over their consistent gripes about the economy and inflation. It’s hard to believe but the administration’s measure of core inflation doesn’t include food or energy, the two volatile areas of most concern for people.

I often look at these developments with feelings of schadenfreude, especially on the Republican side since the party seems to have embarked on a singular road to ruin.

I don’t want to be called an elitist, but in some ways I am. I want to balance my long-shot liberalism with the more stable truths of music, art, history and literature. Well, that’s become pretty difficult. Right now, I’m rereading Thomas Mann’s great novel from the 1940s, Doctor Faustus, and the book is full of political implications. (Does everything have political implications?)

The author’s mad genius of music, Adrian Leverkhün, makes his Faustian deal with the devil for musical mastery. One reviewer notes that Zeitblom, the book’s narrator,

fatally turns a blind eye, distracted by social events and awed by Adrian’s genius. He misjudges Adrian in the same way that the [German] nation misjudges Hitler until it’s too late. (And if this doesn’t make you think of Donald Trump, you haven’t been paying attention).

So much of what I read these days seems to echo or predict Trump and the ensuing nightmare he has brought us. American Midnight by Adam Hochschild presents the horrifying history of America’s descent into racial and anti-Red madness from WW I to the 1920s. The parallels to what we are now living through—hatred, violence, corruption, political chaos—are manifest on every page.

Once we understand such history, escaping its relevance is practically impossible. Yet what’s relevant is not always what’s significant, and you can’t read significance into everything political today, which is what so many of us do. Getting away from the news is hard, so you need to live by other truths. Sadly, the older we get, the more we become creatures of habit and custom. Independent thought becomes more difficult.

And finally, I do have my doubts about achieving any kind of genuine detachment about politics. It’s too ingrained in my life, and you have to dig into your soul to find the resources to keep sane. Still, it becomes a matter of keeping one’s mental health in balance. If everything becomes significant, nothing is significant.

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Being Jewish

First of all, being Jewish means recognizing your differences from the non-Jews, the goyim. For me this didn’t really happen until high school, as reported in my memoir:

Once, walking home from high school I got in a fist-fight with an Irish kid who called me all kinds of rich-Jew-bastard names and happened to be a good lightweight boxer from the other side of town. It was totally humiliating. I had no idea of how to duke it out, none, and he kept popping me until finally I just walked away in disgrace, blood from my nose dripping on the snow. After this incident, the kid would go out of his way to say friendly hellos to me at school. I wanted to take his life.

Jews like me were brought up to be non-confrontational. In some ways we thought of ourselves as more like the gentiles than our co-religionists. And, it should be said, most of us didn’t have any real sense of religion, the stark, grim old-testament stuff that fueled our more conservative and orthodox brethren.

Reform Jews like me and my parents were practiced hypocrites about religion. My parents rarely went to temple (never to be called “schul,” of course). But they wanted me to be grounded in the faith so I went to what was called Sunday School starting in, I think, the sixth grade.

Finally, I found it just boring and unenlightening, and I told my mother I wanted to quit. She said that first I should talk with the rabbi, an amiable man named Dick Hertz, whose name made him the butt of many jokes. But I stood my ground and the elders gave way. To this day, I have nothing to do with the religion, though I love Jewish culture, its myths and memes and street wisdom.

In my teens I laughed at the funny pseudo-Yiddish jazz that Slim Gaillard recorded, tunes like “Drei Six Cents” and “Dunkin’ Bagel.” People like Slim and Cab Calloway weren’t mocking the language; they were having fun with it. Slim seemed to look at Judaism the way I did, as an amusing cultural artifact. Mickey Katz was funny, man. After them came Sid Caesar and a wave of Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce. Mel Brooks was my hero later on.

Jewish humor finally permitted folks to dwell on the horrors of World War II after it was over. Earlier, my parents and grandfather Sam did not discuss these things, though Sam sent money early on to save some of the family in Germany. All of it was too grim to confront and, like many, they were living a life of ease.

The 1950s were a time of conformity, as we know. Life had been good for a lot of Americans during the war, and now it was time for some Jews to relax a bit and assimilate culturally. My family was part of this. They made a big deal out of food and sumptuous meals, with fare like matzoh ball soup and latkes (referred to as “German potato pancakes”).

In my later years I strove to recover the truths of what cultural Judaism had become since my family had glossed over it. I finally could take pride in my culture and its ability to survive not only Hitler but a whole history of antisemitism. As I grew older my nose, formerly straight, began to droop. You can’t read too much into that.

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Accepting the Symptoms of Aging

One good thing about getting older is that you begin to disregard all those things that used to irk you. It’s like putting them forever in Spam. About two years ago I wrote a piece called “Retreat of the Elders” which listed some of the symptoms of a growing solitude as we age:

a penchant for eating at home; fewer visits with friends; a preference for books over TV; souring on politics and current affairs; pique with the common culture; not suffering fools gladly; and so on.

Lately I’ve discovered a few more things that aging permits us to dispense with. It’s not so much a withdrawal from the common culture as it is preserving one’s own equanimity. Here are a few big ones.

    • Leaving your house for social/cultural affairs. Your old motivations to party or attend an event don’t pull you out anymore. Home is comfort and convenience; parties are typically boring; and you could fall down on the way to a concert.
    • Driving. God, I used to love cars. Now they are an occasional convenience, nothing more. See “Old People Driving” for a full report. “Oldsters are naturally jealous about keeping their driving privileges, and they can get very testy about it.”
    • Drinking and eating. One’s appetite for both declines with age. Booze no longer has the effect it once had, and going out to eat is expensive and often disappointing.
    • Arguing with idiots. Actor Keanu Reeves “gave an interview about growing older and said he protects his peace by refusing to argue with anyone about anything. He said, ‘2+2 is 5? You are correct. Have a nice day.’” As we age our tendency is to avoid all bullshit if possible. Your drama is not my drama.

Now, the real test is to avoid being caught up emotionally with all the current Trump melodrama. The media constantly assaults us with the gravity of what’s at stake, the indictments, their historical relevance, the intransigence of MAGA, the folly of T’s clownish advisors—none of which we can do anything about.

Trump fatigue affects everybody, right and left. We’re stuck watching the same bad B-movie over and over with no end in sight. Or, pick your metaphor, you’re slogging through the desert with no water, cast adrift at sea, feasting on the sugar high of anger, etc.

We’re all confounded by Trump. But we don’t have to let him take over our lives. Older people have the luxury of memories, not just to escape the present chaos but to give us context for what we’re now living through. Better to be old these days than young.

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The Devolution of Bad Taste

Bad taste is a complicated subject. I know this because I’ve been exploring it as a subject for a book. If you think about it, we are living in a world dominated by bad taste, however you want to define the term.

It used to be that bad taste could be shuffled off by the elites as just something the kinky and unenlightened produce. Elites like Susan Sontag (On Camp, 1964) treated bad taste (here, camp and kitsch) to lengthy academic analysis, a superior form of lighthearted putdown.

I have a book called The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (1991) in which Jane and Michael Stern roast and ridicule everything from nose jobs and Polynesian food to Lawrence Welk. It used to be a class identifier that we could snicker and laugh at these things. But no more.

I recently looked over my blog posts and saw a host of grim subjects that I sometimes tried to lighten up with personal humor. I hope that was not like the impulse that moved the Sterns to make fun of lower-class culture. But recent polls by Pew show that Americans are grim and very pessimistic about the future, not to mention the present.

And why shouldn’t they be? About some bad taste there’s really no disputing, the latest example being Marjorie Greene’s recent display of Hunter Biden’s naked sex pix in Congress. She should have been expelled for that but was not because even extreme bad taste is now tolerated and accepted—in Congress yet.

When we were growing up, a fart in church was funny bad taste, according to George Carlin. How far we’ve come from those days. A 2022 survey of pop culture is totally depressing, in part because I can’t recognize most of the people and events referred to. “A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika,” said Dorothy Parker. Too much is like a dose of habanero.

Last year Time Magazine said in pop-eyed language:

The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness. . . . Yet what’s remarkable about this particular pendulum swing is that after centuries of wrestling with hierarchies of taste, the cultural stigma that has always come with indulging in bad taste has disappeared.

So far there seems to be no backlash to the flurry of bad taste. I mean why haven’t the Democrats produced compromising pictures of M.T. Greene in flagrante and shown them in Congress? The younger culture seems at times to be pursuing a sense of doom, maybe nihilism. If culture is enlightenment, the new bad taste glorifies most any excess and flouts the most accepted of values. Are the Barbarians at the gates?

In a way, bad taste has always done this but often with a sense of humor, as in camp and kitsch. Humor is not fashionable now, but as I tried to say in a piece about Oscar Wilde it is part of survival. Now whatever we define as good taste must subsume everything bad taste is not. Without bad taste, how could good taste thrive?

P.S. The game is not over. Hearing yesterday about Tony Bennett’s passing made me realize that good taste still exists; it’s just hibernating. Tony was a wonderful man who made a career out of good taste—in music and in his life. That life and his talent, all 96 years of it, represented the kindest and best of American culture. He made good taste popular.