Midnight on the Forecastle

Coriolanus & Conservatism

In anticipation of seeing The Old Globe production of Coriolanus this summer, I’ve been doing some research on the play and familiarizing myself with its particulars.  It’s not a play that I’ve ever seen performed live (although I have seen the 1984 BBC production on DVD).  As one of Shakespeare’s most political plays – perhaps the most political – it has a history of being produced with an eye toward whatever contemporary political viewpoint happens to be in vogue at the moment.  Which isn’t a bad thing – if anything, it vindicates Shakespeare’s understanding of certain timeless aspects of man as a political animal.  My own take on the play is that of Coriolanus as a kind of Conservative Überhero; in him I see shades of Sen. John McCain, Gen. Odierno, President Eisenhower, and even Dick Cheney.  Just as Dick Cheney famously said, “So?” (with respect to public opinion), so Coriolanus is equally contemptuous of the “voices” of the common people.  A recent post on RedState.com echoed this deeply felt conservative notion that the ideal state of man is a kind of lofty detachment from the petty concerns of mere humans: 

…concede nothing (you can always agree, but you do not concede); you keep going back to a disputed point over and over again until they get tired of trying to sneak one past you; 

[snip] 

…you don’t accept the other side’s presumptuous bluff that they speak for the American people.  Because they don’t. 

And you don’t give a tinker’s dam if they like you afterward. To quote Truman: if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. 

This is pure Coriolanus: a powerful and successful military man who is a god-awful politician, a man of principle who won’t suffer fools even at the price of his life, a patrician colossus who acts as though civility, humility and humanity were mortal weaknesses.  In her excellent essay on Coriolanus in her book, Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber makes the following points: 

Coriolanus, though married and a father, regards himself, with wounded and defensive pride, as alone.  More than almost any other Shakespearean hero, he aims at a status that is less like that of a man and more like that of a dragon, a god, or a machine – someone, or something, in other words, that does not feel.

[snip] 

This propensity to reject or displace family and personal ties, in favor of the presumed larger purposes and less fraught emotional commitments to warfare and heroism, produces in Coriolanus the play a striking and persistent line of imagery that allies its martial heroes with what has been called “male bonding” or “homosocial” behavior – in this case the identification of the love object with the military commander or military rival. 

[snip]

Coriolanus is a complicated dramatic character, the more so because he seems to have uncanny ahistorical similarities with embedded social types of a much later era, like the products of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British public schools: he is repressed; devoted to authority; committed to male bonding, fellowship, risk, and danger; slightly overpunctilious; impatient or condescending toward perceived social inferiors; awkward and even unhappy in situations that require small talk, gracious manners, accommodation, compromise, and a show of feeling.

[snip]

The play ends in death and in victory, in the ambush and murder of a man whose final flaw was his first yielding to human feeling, who was safe so long as he regarded himself as a monster without kin or a lonely dragon in his fen.  Shockingly, yet somehow fittingly, it is only at the moment when Coriolanus acknowledges himself as a member of the human race, as a man with human ties – mother, wife, child, friend – that he becomes really vulnerable.  For this act of simple human recognition he is murdered. 

Unlike many modern conservatives, Coriolanus is not necessarily a figure to be mocked... but his story and theirs eerily mirror each other.

Bruce Springsteen's Magic

I picked up a copy of Bruce Springsteen's Magic this afternoon (see A.O. Scott's Springsteen article in the NYT). Although it ought to come as no surprise, it nonetheless is surprising just how tonally precise and prescient it is, while simultaneously being the most historically accurate emotional exegesis of the last six years I've come across. I kind of freaks me out. This album is further evidence that when Springsteen decided to "cash in" the capital he had accrued with his audience to support Kerry's presidential bid, he was not merely stepping onto the political stage for a dilettantesque pirouette before returning to his previous line of work. He had moved fully into the socio-political realm (as his Vote for Change and Seeger Sessions tours presaged). I'm no art critic, but Magic strikes me as a fully digested expression of the hammerlock of misery, loss and heartache that the Bush Years have relentlessly inflicted on America. But it's more than that as well.

The track Gypsy Biker is the cold resolution of Born to Run; a huge and unapologetic shift in the zeitgeist that he both foreshadowed and ushered into existence. It's hard not to look to Springsteen as our cultural soothsayer and pilot, since his greatest achievements in the past have always pointed the way for an army of artistic seekers and prophets. In Nebraska, he brought us the cleanest and most wretched version of the America-as-dystopia-made-redemptive-through-scattershot-violence mystique that had been germinating since The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. Commenting on Springsteen's revisiting of the source material for Terrence Malick's Badlands, Howard Hampton writes in Born in Flames:

Springsteen's narration is no less artistic than the faux-naif pronouncements of Sissy Spacek's blank-teller Holly or preening Martin Sheen's overcooked James Dean sausage Kit but a lot more matter-of-factly believable. Springsteen sticks closer to the facts, while every ironic-poetic embellishment Malick adds only serves to score cheap points of the fatuousness of the young killers and even their victims, whose deaths seem less like coldblooded murder than inadvertent euthanasia – putting poor human cattle out of their misery; that is, if they weren't too blind, deaf, and numb to recognize it as misery in the first place.

[...] The film returns us to an instantly recognizable yesterday, that received version of America in the late 1950's hemmed in by sterility and affectless kitsch on one side and white-trash clutter on the other, where Springsteen gets at something more inscrutable, a sense of human experience reverberating beneath the mythic and/or banal. He doesn't view "Nebraska" as a world apart, inhabited by little more than stiff-necked marionettes, monstrosities, and crash-test dummies whose heads are stuffed with true-romance and true-crime pulp: he strikes a fine balance between mundane reality and what Pauline Kael called "the glamour of delinquency," the 1950s' first inchoate wave of alienation given iconic status by Dean and Marlon Brando. In "Nebraska," those two strands of life (real and dream) intersect, commingle, fuse, as they do in photographer Robert Frank's road-trip classic The Americans.

I quote this because as I listen to Magic I can't help but feel that a similar type of epochal alchemy is being practiced; the lyrics and melodies combine "a sense of human experience reverberating beneath the mythic and/or banal," only this time the "human experience" is the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, Guantanamo and al Qaeda-inspired homegrown terror and fear.

For someone like me, who exists in a perpetual state of vacillation between pure rage and indifferent resignation, it's an interesting thing to hear the voice of someone mature enough to view the loss of something precious with a more stable eye.

My faith's been torn asunder,
Tell me is that rollin' thunder
Or just the sinkin' sound
of somethin' righteous goin' under?

Clearly, it's both.

Value and Art

George W. Bush recently offered his assessment of the arts in America:

"Many people are surprised when told about [Admiral Mike Mullen]’s show business roots.  After all, he is humble, well-grounded and filled with common sense.  Not exactly what one thinks about when they think of Hollywood values," said Bush.

What are big business values?  What are the values of scientific inquiry?  What are religious values?  We all have shorthanded ways of understanding each of these things.  Using these phrases can be an easy way to communicate a point.  Unfortunately, the point is often made at the expense of accuracy and truth.  To a large extent this is because actions are not always conduits for what we think of as “values”; we ascribe value after-the-fact as a consequence of judgment.  When our understanding is hobbled, so is our judgment.

Let’s take the example of big business.  It is widely assumed by many that big business is a soulless, greedy, monolithic thing that is inherently bent upon achieving its goals (i.e. growth, wealth, hegemonic power) without regard for any other considerations – including social welfare, equity, altruism, or even honesty.  By and large this is untrue.  Like political factions we disagree with, the people who are actively involved in the furtherance of a particular corporation’s goals believe that they are participating in an endeavor that it basically good for the world and for humanity.  (There are, of course, exceptions.)  Why do I say this?  Because human motivation is both complex and imminently understandable.  Successful entrepreneurs are interested in the industries they participate in.  They choose them.  They want to produce good products and/or services and want to be loved and respected for doing so.  If they were motivated solely by the desire for profit at any costs, they would behave in radically different ways than they actually do.  This is not to say that people don’t get out of hand or even evil in their pursuits; only that the individual’s motives (which are reflected in collective action) are rarely as cartoonish as we often make them.

I mention this concession to an archetype I despise (big business) to segue into a defense of the entertainment industry, the raison d'être of which can be traced to the antithesis of both social engineering and the profit motive: creative imagination.  Indeed, the values of those in the field of entertainment are multivalent and sometimes express themselves in insidious and parasitic ways… but the central governing principle is primarily aesthetic and usually visceral.  And the visceral – at its best – is not beholden to humility, well-groundedness or common sense.  These are qualities better suited to other fields.  If the arts in America were solely the province of the “squares,” our cultural landscape would be a sad thing indeed.  Fortunately, it is the misfits and dreamers who see fit (and are afforded the liberty) to pursue this difficult path.  (I can say with a certain degree of authority that if their principle motivation is profit, they’ve chosen the wrong path entirely.)

Back to “Hollywood values.”  There is a strong tendency here to look at apples and compare them oranges.  It’s a favorite game of conservatives (of the Michael Medved stripe) to see entertainment as a frontier in need of colonization, civilization and settlement.  The social engineering championed by the Christian hardliners and cultural warriors of the right is characterized by a desire to create a homogenous and idealized value-set for all of America (and perhaps everywhere else besides).  It’s not an unrealistic goal: it’s happened before and it exists in other parts of the word.  Societies dominated by Islamic fundamentalism come to mind.

Bush is right when he says that “humble, well-grounded and filled with common sense [are] not exactly what one thinks about when they think of Hollywood values.”  His implication is that they should be.  In his ideal world, they would be.  Which is why Bush, and those who share his aesthetic worldview, are dangerous, stupid, and venal.  The charitable view would posit that he is merely ignorant of art (which is undoubtedly true).  The honest view is that his political goal (along with those who follow him) is to sanitize and eviscerate the artistic heart of an entire country.

ADDENDUM: Please enjoy a few stupid links.