Doug Wilson was on some show and though he doesn't give a rip he still felt obliged to write 1,346 about having been on that show.

First off, HT to Jim West for linking to a post by Du Mez.  It's important to chronicle how and where you hear of things.  Longtime readers know that's kind of a thing with Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/false-prophets-without-clothes

…

When I was finishing Jesus and John Wayne, a scholar I respect very much questioned my inclusion of Wilson: “Who is this guy? I’ve never heard of him, and I don’t think he’s that important.” Wilson’s Amazon sales numbers at the time seemed to suggest the same. But I knew Wilson wasn’t selling his books on Amazon, and I’d heard too many people attest to his influence to dismiss him. I kept my sections on Wilson in Jesus and John Wayne.

 

I added more in Live Laugh Love, where I also share the perspectives of women caught up in his orbit. More on that in September, but here’s a taste: “…fitting within no established tradition, Wilson started his own school, college, publishing house, and eventually his own denomination. [emphasis added] (Wilson never attended seminary and was not traditionally ordained; placing himself at the top of the chain of command, he wielded authority but answered to no one.)”

…

Now I have not bothered to read Jesus and John Wayne (despite actually having the book) for reasons I have explained elsewhere.  It’s very easy to scapegoat white Christian nationalist evangelicals at this stage and the somewhat obvious demise of not only pax Americana in general but any sense of stability in the current administration. Doug Wilson claims to be a Burkean conservative.  Curiously, Wenatchee The Hatchet considers himself to be a Burkean conservative but whereas I have described myself as a Mark Hatfield Republican after the Oregon Senator from the last century, Wilson has described himself as a theocratic libertarian. 

 

If we’re going to indulge in playing Doug Wilson’s kind of word games (and, fair warning, at the level he plays them at) then a "theocratic libertarian" comes off sort of like a virgin prostitute who is technically a virgin only by way of the most technical of technicalities. Wilson couldn’t resist having a hot take on hot takes on hotties by way of commenting on Sydney Sweeney.  It seems to be one of the traits of the New Calvinist types by way of Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll that Wilson can discuss Sweeney, and Driscoll could discuss Adriana Lima and Jenna Jameson, but if some lowly tithing peon were to admit he knows who those women are, well, the subordinate pastors would tell the guy it’s time for a heart check moment.  

It’s something to keep in mind about how pervasively these kinds of guys have moving and movable goalposts for their metacultural punditry. They get to pontificate about blonde bombshells, models and porn stars for sake of cultural commentary about how bad things are. If you’re an ordinary guy you’re probably not supposed to even know who these women are.

 

Stuff that I don’t doubt Du Mez is familiar with.

a brief thought on a paradoxical aspect to Ted Gioia's Substacking--the MAGA streak at the heart of his project

 If you haven't read anything by Ted Gioia in the last twenty years this gnomic observation may be impossible to follow, and it may be impossible to follow if you have read things he's written in the last twenty years.

When I read his piece asking (rhetorically, of course) whether Mickey Mouse could make Disney great again the answer to his question is "Yes".  I would venture to say the answer is "No".  Yet the Shock of the Old is that everything is a reboot and the entertainment industry isn't taking any risks and we not only need to stop living in the past, we need Romanticism 2.0.

Talk about living in the past.  I have blogged this thought a few times but we don't need Romanticism 2.0.  We're not done getting rid of the worst and most racist elements of Romanticism 1.0.  We live in an era in which writers who are ostensibly as secular and progressive as can be in politics can't resist writing about the liberal arts in general and music in particular without recourse to the language of magic, sorcery, trance, spirit possession and the like.  Or, like Ted Gioia, music is magic and all real music history comes from sorcery but "they" don't want you to know this.  If we could be bring back the magic in music culture would thrive.

Ted Gioia has a MAGA streak for American cultural production.  As Jed Esty put it so succinctly in The Future of Decline, Make America Great Again was the motto of Aaron Sorkin productions for all the W years well before Trump's first term. Esty's advice was the United States should reconcile itself to the reality of its decline and not try to pull a Great Britain because Great Britain trying to hold on to its empire kinda got them two world wars and the thorough and irrevocable demise of said empire.

Now it would seem that the United States isn't going to heed any potential lessons there.  The old saw is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but Hollywood has shown that it's easier to keep imagining the end of the world than to imagine a world that isn't saved by Americans, let alone dialing back the entire cinematic scene to make the world a more hospitable place--consider the carbon footprint of every single movie that gets churned out in the trans-Atlantic world and ask whether those movies really make the world better.  

Gioia has a dogmatic commitment to a form of Romanticism where things always need to be shaken up. More than half a century ago Leonard Meyer floated the idea in Music, The Arts, and Ideas that all the revolutions had already happened by 1965 or so and that the future was going to be hybrids and mash-ups created by formalists playing with fusions and that no new revolutionary style was going to dominate any of the arts, least of all music.   

Ted Gioia's Mickey Mouse fantasy shows that he's torn between two impulses, saying that we Americans need to get out of the cultural ruts but by wanting Mickey back he's functionally advocating for making one of the biggest ruts in American pop culture deeper than ever.