Have it Your Way
August 15, 2006
It has been some time since I have been able to get a message off. The Cathedral’s flock of carrier pigeons has been decimated by bird flu, and besides, I have been off herding goats across the mountain pass. Bully! Few things do the soul as much good as a stubborn goat at 16,000 feet.
But alas, I cannot completely escape the sewage stew that some people call “modern life,” as many of my “colleagues” are so eager to point out. So, a dip of the toe (complete with popular “culture” references to slake the appetites of my nihilist friends at First Things). Who says I am not “in” the world?
First up, this gem from Gilbert “Gil” Meilaender reviewing Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. According to Gil, Dreher is one stuck-up prig for wanting to focus on anything more permanent that a YouTube clip. It’s a dry erase culture and you can rewrite your life three times a day if you want, says Gil, and never lose a convivial moment with the neighbors. What happens in Burger King stays in Burger King—because it’s a Burger King World, baby, and you can’t leave. In fact, the Whopper and ESPN are transcendent goods defendable against any rebellious backwards glances at apple pies and baseball.
Meilaender is a person who wants to embrace the suburbourgeoisie so much he will attack anyone who wants to focus on their children as dangerously idealist eggheads sure to have asshole kids. Best to just stick them in “school” and enjoy Whoppers together.
Worst of all, Meilaender’s big argument involves taking the “lifestyle” superficiality of some of Dreher’s book and turning it into an angry defense of Burger King and of the idea that likes and taste have nothing to do with “morality” or the soul. I thought this guy was an ethicist.
Then again, perhaps Gil is right. One of my wayward acolytes reported to me recently that he ran into Gil at a MILF conference (something to do with promoting the goal of modern women to have both a family and a career) in Toledo, Ohio, during which, between watching informational videos, they convened at the local White Castle and enjoyed Baywatch re-runs. Apparently, it was a very convivial time. Shazam! I must just be an irrelevant stick-in-the-mud fogey.
Speaking of First Things, I just don’t understand its collective mind. Here is Jody Bottom in a bizarrely confessional mood trying to wrap his Yankee-ass self around a cultural phenomenon that is neither: 1) approved by the managerial elites for mass production and consumption by the Dilbert Gilberts of the world; or 2) approved of by the managerial elite for “artistic” production in “cultural” centers for consumption by the Bottoms of the world.
Apparently, there is a Hawaiian ukulele player named Jake Shimabukuro who is, in Bottom’s estimation, just too damn good to be playing the uke. “The question, when you hear him, is why: If you are this good on a ukulele, why are you playing a ukulele?” The presence of this Uke-mad genius has upset Bottom’s desire to take a break from “first things” and engage in some good old fashioned snobbery. “Today I was going to add the ukulele [to our list of mockable instruments]—an instrument that, for purists, ranks somewhere between the accordion and the theremin in pointlessness: If you’re a good-enough musician to make a ukulele actually sound good, you’re too good to be wasting your time with a ukulele. But now I don’t know. Is a talent at something unimportant thereby an unimportant talent?”
Bottom can’t answer the question in the end, and remains ambivalent. What can explain the cultural and intellectual insecurity on maudlin display at First Things? I think it is the manifestation of full blown snobbery brought by submission to the masters of Wall Street and 5th Avenue. A known and keenly felt inferiority brings on the curious combination of pretending to enjoy our plastic lives while fashioning ourselves as connoisseurs of fine leather, marble, and cherrywood. This brings the bizarre spectacle of people who plop their BK have-it-your-way Whopper drive-through on their “handcrafted Amish dinner-table” and then turn around and pop in the latest London Philharmonic CD into their made-in-China Wal-Mart standard-issue under-the-cupboard CD player.
After this kind of cultural diet, I doubt if the First Things crowd could recognize a genuine cultural artifact if it rose up and bit them in the collective bottom. But perhaps if Jake Shimabukuro really applied himself, he could put his wasted talent to some important cultural task such as making Whoppers. Now that is something everyone at First Things could appreciate.
This is Have it Your Way in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Stegall in CT on Suburbia | Next: Make this Man a Cardinal | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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