Rod Dreher linked to this earlier in the week and I was thinking about commenting on it but ... I didn't find it quite as funny as he did. Flanagan's defense of the art of Michael Jackson had made it clear she took the stance of art-as-religion and that, however much a monster Jackson may have turned out to be, his art is worthy.
I've seen this kind of defense of the art of monsters made even more explicitly. The thing is, I disagree. It's not that I can't see that Charles Dickens was a brilliant novelist in spite of how shamefully he treated his wife. I can even see how artists who are keenly insightful about social injustices can be unjust at a personal level.
The problem I have, and it may be because I am willing to simply admit an admiration for some Puritan authors, is that I don't think we can altogether give up the Tolstoy-derived idea that artists should in some way actually be basically decent people before we take them to be artists. That, I think, is a fairly normative expectation of artists-as-priests in the era of modernism that is often tacitly taken up as often as it is explicitly denied. Weiwei can shift from "I'm an artist not a priest" to making a more or less priestly homily about the value of human rights and do so from a position which takes as given that artists are somehow the priests and prophets who speak truth to power, as I've written earlier. I do think that writers and artists and musicians can and should speak to what they regard as the misuses of formal and informal power! There are possibly millions of words here at this blog demonstrating that.
It's not that people are going to be perfect, it's that the invocation that nobody's perfect is the distillation of a lot of fans of artists and, more so, their fans, who make the shift from the concession of imperfection to a declaration that the artist and fan have a moral license to ignore X, Y or Z because A through W is so necessary to "society" we should just look the other way. The defense is not necessarily of the artist and the quality of his or her work or even his or her or their character, it's a defense of "me", and a defense of consumption of art as a kind of sanctifying sacrament. I can agree in the abstractest of abstract that participating in the creation of art "could" make you a better person but I don't see that it has, does, or will. If what people do when artists turn out to be monsters is hand wave the failure rate for artists being merely basically decent people as distinct from saints when the subject of monstrous comes up then they're not ideally situated to sound off on the systemic and cultural corruptions through which the elite lord it over the masses by way of leveraging rare privileges in ways that people don't "officially" know about until a college admissions scandal erupts.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
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I did not come from a religious family, but we had a god, and the god was art, specifically literature. Taking a job teaching “Ozymandias” to a new generation was, for me, the equivalent of taking religious orders.
And so when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have taken it. My god was art, not the SAT. In my excitement at this apparent promotion, I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse. Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.
I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.
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As someone who's loved the non-fiction work of Tom Wolfe I might want to point out that one of the more pedestrian aspects of the New Journalism has been the authorial voice mediating the entire newspeg. If you'll entertain a weekend joke, the sign of a pervasive narcissism in American culture should not merely be inferred from selfies and "influencers" and complaints about such. The capacity for American narcissism doesn't even have to be extrapolated from American writers who even live in America. It may be part of the contemporary American spirit to insist upon writing about a news story in a way where, if you can get away with it in the publishing venue, you simply, reflexively, and flamboyantly integrate your very being by way of authorial voice into the discussion of the topic.
Flanagan does that here in her piece on admissions. She has a right to, of course, by way of having worked in admissions, but that's simultaneously what robs her of doing more than a second-rate Tom Wolfe homage. If you've never read Tom Wolfe what made him brilliant as a journalist was that however personal and personable (or grating) his literary voice, he did not put himself into the writing as an explicit character. Or you could go with Joan Didion, who did put herself into the work as a character but as a kind of bemused or benumbed observer, even when she was writing about her own psych evaluation results.
If this seems like a pedantic point for an amateur, a blogger no less, to write about, it's a point that I feel is worth mentioning. We live in an era in which journalists or ... at least writers who write at places like The Atlantic or Slate or elsewhere, make themselves inseparable from what it is they're writing about. Flanagan has done us the favor of explaining what god she venerates. That's fair ... but she'll go on to make a point that I"ll comment on later. Let's get back to her story about herself as a sample perspective for the college admissions scandal.
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The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. A college counselor at an elite prep school is supposed to be a combination of cheerleader, concierge, and talent agent, radically on the side of each case and applying steady pressure on the dream college to make it happen. At the very least, the counselor is not supposed to be an adversary.
I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.
Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little, that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it’s because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.
Sometimes, in anger and frustration, the parents would blame me for the poor return on investment they were getting on their years of tuition payments. At that point, I was living in a rent-controlled apartment and paying $198 a month on a Civic with manual windows. I was in no position to evaluate their financial strategies. Worst of all, the helpless kid would be sitting right there, shrinking into the couch cushions as his parents all but said that his entire secondary education had been a giant waste of money. The parents would simmer down a bit, and the four of us would stew in misery. Nobody wanted to hear me read “Ozymandias.”
I will now add as a very truthful disclaimer that the horrible parents constituted at most 25 percent of the total, that the rest weren’t just unobjectionable, but many—perhaps most—were lovely people who were so wise about parenting that when I had children of my own, I often remembered things they had told me. But that 25 percent was a lesson that a lifetime of reading novels hadn’t yet taught me. In the classroom I was Jane Eyre, strong and tranquil in the truth of my gifts; in the college-counseling office, I was the nameless heroine of Rebecca, running up and down the servant stairs at the Hôtel d’Azur as Mrs. Van Hopper barked at me.
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Much of the discussion of this scandal has centered on the corruption in the college-admissions process. But think about the kinds of jobs that the indicted parents held. Four of them worked in private equity, a fifth in the field of “investments,” others in real-estate development and the most senior management of huge corporations. Together, they have handled billions of dollars’ worth of assets within heavily regulated fields—yet look how easily and how eagerly they allegedly embrace a crooked scheme, as quoted in the court documents.
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When I was a prep-school college counselor 25 years ago, I thought that whatever madness was whirring through the minds of the parents was a blip of group insanity that would soon abate. It has only gotten more and more extreme. Anyone can understand a parent’s disappointment if he had thought for 17 years that his child would go to Yale one day, only to learn that it’s not in the cards. But what accounted for the intensity of emotion these parents expressed, their sense of a profound loss, of rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs? They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all. [emphasis added]
In the recent past—the past in which this generation of parents grew up—a white student from a professional-class or wealthy family who attended either a private high school or a public one in a prosperous school district was all but assured admission at a “good” college. It wasn’t necessarily going to be Harvard or Yale, but it certainly might be Bowdoin or Northwestern. That was the way the system worked. But today, there’s a squeeze on those kids. The very strong but not spectacular white student from a good high school is now trying to gain access to an ever-shrinking pool of available spots at the top places. He’s not the inherently attractive prospect he once was.
These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bitching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bitching; some of them decided to go MAGA.
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If Flanagan has the numbers to demonstrate that formerly limousine liberals have gone MAGA the stats are not provided, to my recollection, in the article. That's an interesting rhetorical flourish but that's another way in which this article comes off as Tom Wolfe lite. Wolfe, more famously, wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities, something along the lines of "You think the future doesn't know how to cross a bridge?"
To lump working class whites in with the private college scene seems like a sloppy move. It's possible to go from a humdrum economic background to private schools and get an education. I know a few who have. But I have trouble with the conflation of the collapse of manufacturing jobs with shifts in elite college admissions. That doesn't seem to really apply. I have enough friends who never graduated from high school and either went to GED or just never finished high school to know that their inability to get manufacturing jobs was not necessarily the same thing as not going to Holyoake. It's not that the pie has shrunk, exactly, it's where the slices go. From one perspective the shift to a more diversified elite in culture-making terms could be a real change. I've read enough arts coverage and interviews to see how intersectionality can come up for artists who aren't white and reflect upon the newness of people of color and women having larger roles in what some call the "culture industry". Norman Lebrecht has written about how there are more women conductors. Some of that, I'm sure, is a positive development. What it has to do with high school dropouts not getting construction jobs, though, is a bit beyond me, and it's not clear to me why Flanagan thinks that point needs to be made. It's another way in which her work, florid and at times amusing as it is, is still second-rate Tom Wolfe.
Perhaps Flanagan is writing around a double standard, the double standard in which those she describes as limousine liberals grasp at and claw toward the privileges they feel they and their children deserve while lamenting the rise of Trump or, by some alchemy of resentments, catalyze. Those kinds of double standards may be unavoidable. People who otherwise stand for faithfulness and marriage can nevertheless throw their hat into the ring with someone married four times because they like the policies he says he'll put into place, not unlike how decades ago people who were in favor of someone who said "it's the economy, stupid" were willing to sign on to his list of policies even if, at a personal level, he seemed to have a lot of personal foibles.
It's not that I particularly liked Clinton or like Trump, I dislike them both, but what both men bring out in their supporters is the extent to which they will overlook X, Y and Z because they are excited about A through W. Where the double standards seem to emerge is in the outrage that some other group of people makes that political trade-off. As John Halle was writing, that the supporters of Clinton looked the other way about his alleged misconduct meant that when a GOP candidate was alleged to have done the same things Clintonites could not just act as though nobody joked about dragging a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park. By the same token, the idea that we now have a first lady who is classy unlike the previous one is dubious at best.
A writer of Flanagan's standing could decide that working class sorts are getting less of a piece of the pie but she didn't convince me that the piece of the pie for working class people is the same as the piece of the pie for people like her who want to teach "Ozymandias" to college students. Why would that all be part of one piece of the metaphorical pie? It's never clear.
But I'm willing to say that there is a tension between her art-as-religion defense of someone like Michael Jackson and her glee at the shame of limousine liberals. I don't see that these two things are separable, though I'm not trying to say she's separating them, either. If Michael Jackson was a monster but his art is still worth celebrating how fully separable is that from the observation that privileged limousine liberals have been able to game the culture industry so as to ensure their children get into the celestial empire of culture-makers? Wasn't Michael Jackson himself thrust into the pantheon of artists-as-demigods by way of family? Had the Jackson 5 not become popular would we have heard of Janet? I'm suggesting that the difference between a Tom Wolfe and a Caitlin Flanagan might
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