a couple of NYT pieces on the gay architects and chroniclers of rock--discussions of Jann Wenner and Brian Epstein within the corporate empires of rock and pop music

In his giant five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin kicked off volume 1 with a comment that he was going to bypass the entire Adorno-inspired Frankfurt School school of thought about an alleged culture industry.  The chief problem with an anti-capitalist inspired notion of culture industry, Taruskin wrote, was the presumption that the products of a culture industry could be collapsed into simple categories.  The industry of culture, if we have to call it that, can't be construed in such monolithic terms in any era. 

Moreover, Taruskin noted, if we looked at 20th century music history it was precisely the culture industry that the Frankfurt school condemned that actually made financial life for musicians and composers in minority positions to make careers.  Black musicians in the United States were able to become part of the cultural life of the nation because of the so-called culture industry.

And as has been discussed at moderate length in some fairly mainstream publications, the gay community and gays were able to play defining roles in the culture industry.  Sure, there were white guys in the first half of the 20th century who regarded the culture industry as all bad and Adorno was one of them, but Adorno's writings against jazz as a generic indicator of mass/popular music are well-known.  There are pretty solid reasons why people have denounced Adorno's condemnation of jazz as being elitist and racist and sexist, but thanks to the sheer level of intra-academic influence Adorno has had in the realm of aesthetics people from the right and the left and the center have had to address stuff he's written.

But, getting particularly to the matter of the role gays have played in shaping rock music, the NYT has had a couple of pieces lately.  The role Jann Wenner played in defining rock journalism for half a century can't be skated over. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/books/jann-wenner-biography-joe-hagan.html


...

Two previous attempts at an authorized Wenner biography had come to nothing. In 2003, Mr. Wenner enlisted Lewis MacAdams, a longtime friend and former Rolling Stone contributor, only to pull out after reading a few hundred pages. (Knopf, which had initially bought Mr. MacAdams’s book, said the stalled deal was canceled in 2014.) In 2011, a similar arrangement with the Rolling Stone writer and author Rich Cohen made it to the proposal phase — Spiegel & Grau offered a reported $1 million — before Mr. Wenner revoked his cooperation.

To test Mr. Wenner’s willingness to handle unflattering information about himself, Mr. Hagan said he gathered anecdotes, including from the 1990 book “Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History” by Robert Draper, which was said to be banned in the magazine’s offices, and ran them by his prospective subject.


“He became incredibly agitated,” Mr. Hagan said. “I came out of that meeting very disenchanted.” Mr. Wenner also indicated that he would like to have some veto power over coverage of his sexual history.

In a letter to Mr. Wenner shortly after their meeting, Mr. Hagan wondered whether he could write a biography “in which part of your life is fenced off from my inquiry.” He added, “You spent 27 years traveling in elite celebrity circles as a gay man married to a woman.” Mr. Hagan demanded the biography be unauthorized. “I have to be able to determine for myself what’s relevant and what isn’t,” he wrote. “And I can’t do that under the threat of legal recourse.”

Eventually, Mr. Wenner agreed to read the book only once it had reached its final form, and Mr. Hagan signed a deal for $1.5 million with Knopf.

Across years of reporting, Mr. Hagan conducted more than 240 interviews and spoke with Mr. Wenner for dozens of hours. He mined Rolling Stone archives and his subject’s cache of letters and files. “From boyhood, he compulsively hoarded every document of his life,” Mr. Hagan writes in the book’s prologue, “because he believed he would one day be important.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/style/the-gay-architects-of-classic-rock.html


One of the 20th century’s most powerful creations was the rock star: the preening, erotic god of guitar-fired defiance. But those who embodied that character didn’t spring from nowhere. Managers groomed them and shaped them, and in the classic rock era those managers were often gay men.

For decades, the close relationships between the managers and the predominantly straight musicians they advised were not discussed much. Lately, however, they have become a point of pride and celebration. [emphasis added]

“The Fifth Beatle,” a recent graphic novel that focuses on the personal life of the Fab Four’s gay manager, Brian Epstein, was a New York Times best seller and is now in development as a six-part mini-series, with the approval of the Beatles’ estate. And the documentary film “Lambert & Stamp” made clear the important role played by Kit Lambert, the gay co-manager of the Who, in shaping the band’s identity.

Another image maker of the classic-rock era, Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, is the subject of a new biography by Joe Hagan, “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine,” which stresses the role his sexuality played in his presentations of male rock stars throughout the magazine’s history. (Mr. Wenner did not come out to the press until the mid-1990s).


“Being gay gave me a finer appreciation of the sexuality of the guys up there,” Mr. Wenner says in the book. “I could understand that in a way others didn’t.”


...

Mr. Napier-Bell sees the entire notion of rock ’n’ roll rebellion as an extension of “gay anger.” “We were against the establishment, the government and the law, which was against us,” he said. “It was an attitude felt by the managers that was expressed through their groups.”

At the same time, many of the gay men came from more refined backgrounds than the rockers, an experience they transferred to their charges. “Brian came from a world of classical music and jazz,” Mr. Tiwary said. “He envisioned that the Beatles would be like the great classical composers and be remembered long after they were gone.” [emphasis added]

Mr. Lambert, whose father was a prominent classical composer, pushed Mr. Townshend to write a rock opera, resulting in “Tommy.” “Kit molded me as a composer,” Mr. Townshend said in “Lambert & Stamp.”

If the young rockers benefited from the taste and ambition of their gay advisers, in turn the managers got a sense of connection they otherwise couldn’t achieve. “It’s not like a gay man at the time could marry or enjoy a family,” Mr. Cooper said. “With a band, there’s a sense of an extended family. They could raise and nurture the musicians and put all the complexity of their experience into something of worth.”

While an author at the LA Review of Books could propose the real bad guys are corporations and capitalism the trouble is that there is ultimately never an innocent cultural dynasty of patronage and there never will be one in this world. 

Whatever its indie/counter-cultural roots or initial reputation by the time I was a kid in the Reagan years no magazine could have been more full-bore establishment within rock than Rolling Stone. It may be that you remember things as they were when you felt you were in your prime.  I mean, there are people now who probably remember a local megachurch through the prism of their own promising youth.

https://slate.com/arts/2017/10/the-jann-wenner-biography-and-the-hbo-doc-reviewed.html


...

We tend to think of Rolling Stone as a quintessentially Sixties artifact, and the publication certainly presents itself as such. But the magazine gained its true foothold in the 1970s, when it was regularly printing groundbreaking work from the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Greil Marcus, Ben Fong-Torres, and Annie Leibovitz along with ample doses of nostalgia. To later generations of readers, Rolling Stone often seemed like it was incessantly reflecting the Sixties generation back to itself through a soft lens, but the truth is that the magazine had pretty much always been doing that: Read critics like Jon Landau and Lester Bangs in the magazine in the early 1970s, and their writing is already shot through with loss and creeping disillusion. Cameron Crowe, who became one of Rolling Stone’s star feature writers during the 1970s while still a teenager, recalls landing assignments to cover bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and Black Sabbath simply because none of his elders at the mag wanted to write about them. Rock and roll was already dead by then, anyway.

...

As Hagan’s book shows, the driving, irresolvable tension behind both Wenner and his magazine from the beginning was the clash between the desire to do meaningful journalism and the desire to be near fame.  [emphases added] For all the great music writing that Rolling Stone has produced, Wenner has also enjoyed being friends with rock stars and has been known to value those friendships at the expense of editorial credibility, or simply good taste. He’s long given certain stars the right to edit their own interviews before going to press, and the line between criticism and hagiography has frequently blurred, particularly as Wenner and his favorite artists have aged. See this five-star review of Mick Jagger’s 2001 solo effort Goddess in the Doorway, penned by the publisher himself, or more recently, the time Rolling Stone declared U2’s eminently forgettable Songs of Innocence the best album of 2014. Hagan reveals that Wenner demanded the ranking personally. (“My dictate. By fiat, buddy. That’s that.”)


And the line between starfucking and fucking stars over was crossed early and repeatedly. There’s no artist more central to the Rolling Stone mystique than John Lennon: He graced the cover of the magazine’s first issue back in 1967, and Leibovitz’s photo of Lennon and Yoko Ono that appeared on the front of the Jan. 22, 1981 issue—released shortly after Lennon’s murder and entirely dedicated to remembrances of the late Beatle—might be the most famous magazine cover in American history. (If you’ve never read this issue, I’d strongly recommend tracking it down: It is, from front to back, a masterpiece.) Wenner and his magazine have kept Lennon’s memory and legacy alive with purposeful ferocity: Since his death, Lennon has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, either by himself or as a member of the Beatles, no fewer than 15 times.



And yet as Hagan’s book makes clear, the reality of Lennon and Wenner’s relationship was far more complicated than most people knew. In December 1970, Wenner coaxed Lennon into sitting for a lengthy conversation that was published in Rolling Stone in two parts under the title “Lennon Remembers.” It was an extraordinary coup for the young publisher, and to this day it remains the most famous interview Lennon ever gave. Shortly after it ran, Wenner received an offer to turn the interview into a book for $40,000. Lennon was vehemently opposed, but the cash-strapped Wenner did it anyway, and the two never spoke again. (Lennon was so angered that he later supported a short-lived competing magazine, called SunDance, with the intent of putting Rolling Stone out of business.)

POSTSCRIPT:
11-6-2017

There's also some discussion of Wenner's legacy over at The New Yorker, which is no surprise.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/looking-for-jann-wenner

 

 

...

 

But Hagan’s portrait of Wenner is crisp and cutting: using Wenner’s own archive, and more than two hundred and forty interviews (including conversations with Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, Bob Dylan, and Paul McCartney), he narrates the story of an indulgent and widely disliked man who is obsessed with celebrity and consumed by ambition. [emphasis added] (When the editor Will Dana, who worked with Wenner for twenty years, tells Hagan, “I basically think he’s 51 percent good,” it feels like a moment of circumspect generosity.) Hagan’s story is so aggressively substantiated, and so alarmingly consistent, that it’s difficult to imagine how “Sticky Fingers” could have turned out any other way.

 

In the book’s prologue, Hagan cites the magazine’s “radical conventionality” as Wenner’s most striking innovation; Rolling Stone, he explains, “instantly legitimized and mainstreamed the underground.” This process involved equating “confession and frank sexuality with integrity and authenticity,” a wild conflation that quickly became dogma—precious and paramount to the new-media companies (like Vice) that ultimately usurped most of the magazine’s cultural capital.

 

Hagan makes these points early on in “Sticky Fingers,” and the book is adamant throughout about the ways in which Rolling Stone invented cultural value: the journalistic forms it introduced and cherished, the readers it innervated, the brazen and devious ways it commercialized the counterculture. “The framework of American narcissism has its roots in Jann Wenner’s pioneering magazine making,” Hagan explains. He asks his readers to seriously consider Wenner’s role in establishing the tenets and behaviors now associated with modern celebrity: “Today the signifiers of fame—confession, preening self-regard, and blunt sexuality—are so built into modern media manners that few can even recall a time when they were novel.” [emphasis added] (That time, he implies, was before 1967, when Wenner and Ralph Gleason founded the magazine, in San Francisco.) Though I mostly agree with Hagan’s judgment, this is a vast and odious legacy to drop exclusively at Wenner’s feet.

 

Rolling Stone has, at least, always been an engine of progressive politics, and Wenner boldly published some of the best and most interesting New Journalists of the last fifty years, even if—and by now, anyone who writes regularly about the Western canon is resigned to how this sentence ends—most of them were deeply troubled white men who also engaged in wildly sexist or otherwise bigoted behavior. Gonzo is a thrilling but troublesome tradition; even before Rolling Stone published, in 2014, a strangely uncorroborated story about a rape at the University of Virginia, it was hardly a bastion of journalistic integrity. Hunter S. Thompson, probably the magazine’s most famous former contributor, was a stunning stylist but a noted fabulist. [emphases added] Likewise, many of the magazine’s reporters grew uncomfortable with the close relationships that Wenner had with the rock stars they were tasked with covering. Cameron Crowe—whose semi-autobiographical film, “Almost Famous,” is, at heart, a cautionary fable about getting too friendly with your subjects—bristled at being made to play softball with the Eagles. “I felt it was blurring the line that had been so sculpted and held as precious and true,” he told Hagan.

I never took to gonzo journalism myself.  Of the new journalists my favorite was, by far, Joan Didion.  Tom Wolfe was fun to read when he was writing journalism and then he lost his way by writing for the Great American novel tripe that he once scoffed at in his youth.  He's never going to be a great American novelist or even much of a social observer but he was, for a decade or so, a brilliant stylist.  It's just that the New Journalism techniques were probably style above substance, not that there was never no substance, to use an awkward phrase.

Gonzo journalism was in a lot of ways just journalists pretending to be like the rock stars they were interviewing.  The spiral in quality of journalism could be laid at the feet of misunderstandings about the legacy of new journalism but I don't feel like really making that point.  We've had yellow journalism and variants of it for centuries.  We've also had journalism presented as journalism that is really just advertising and sometimes it seems that in the most fundamental way a lot of what is presented as serious arts writing is still basically advertising by another name.  If Wenner's vices were craving celebrity and influence among many other vices ,perhaps it can at least be said of him that he was blunt enough to admit that he wanted to promote music he liked.  It might not be "that" differen tfrom Schumann and Berlioz pumping the reputations of composers and musicians they liked in their time.

at the Atlantic, Alexi Madrigal points out that in the wake of concerns about the exploitation of social media by foreign interests American companies say they're American companies ... loyal to their own policies

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/are-facebook-twitter-and-google-american-companies/544670/

…

 

In response to a tough line of questions from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, gave two conflicting answers within a couple of minutes. Cotton pressed Edgett on Twitter’s decision to cut off the CIA’s access to the Twitter-data fire hose, which is provided through the subsidiary Dataminr, while the company reportedly still allowed the Russian media outlet RT to continue using the service for some time.

“Do you see an equivalency between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Russian intelligence services?,” Cotton asked.
 

“We’re not offering our service for surveillance to any government,” Edgett responded.
 

“So you will apply the same policy to our intelligence community that you’d apply to an adversary’s intelligence services?,” Cotton asked again.
 

“As a global company, we have to apply our policies consistently,” Edgett replied.

Cotton then turned to WikiLeaks, which the Intelligence Committee has designated as a nonstate hostile intelligence agency, asking why it had been operating “uninhibited” on Twitter.
 

“Is it bias to side with America over our adversaries?,” Cotton demanded.
 

“We’re trying to be unbiased around the world,” Edgett said. “We’re obviously an American company and care deeply about the issues we’re talking about today, but as it relates to WikiLeaks or other accounts like it, we make sure they are in compliance with our policies just like every other account.”

I’ve added the emphases within Edgett’s foregoing responses because they highlight the contradiction at the heart of these global communication services, which happen to be headquartered in the state of California. Twitter is both a global company and an American company, and the way it has resolved this contradiction is to declare its allegiance to ... its own policies. [italics original, bold emphasis added]

Madrigal articulates a concern that global communication services companies seem to be loyal first and foremost to themselves and that when it suits them they think of themselves as American or global firms or both depending on what seems best on a case by case basis.  If admidst previously noted concern that the two party system is as gangrenous as it seems to be what we have elsewhere in society is a vaguely global/American set of global communication service provider companies deciding that they're really global and/or American as situations require within their self-understanding of policies then those companies wield a distributional power that could be vulnerable.  Whether the Russians hacked the 2016 election cycle as much as some Democrats believe should still be on the table but "if" the primary concern of that is confined merely to being upset that Clinton didn't get the power she was seen as deserving because she's Hillary Clinton rather than being concerned that ... let me back up a bit.

I wrote a while back that what made 9/11/2001 scary was that it was not a conventional act of war.  What happened was that someone figured out a way to weaponize our civilian transit infrastructure against us and that it would be foolish to presume that this would be how our civilian/commercial infrastructure would be weaponized against us again. 

Now if the concerns about Russian hacking of elections are as legitimate as Democratic sympathizers believe them to be the problem may be that they are not going far enough in their concerns.  The more data-integrated and platform-dependent our infrastructure is the more vulnerable we're going to become.  A national security based reason to be skeptical of a single-payer health care system could be a simple one, that once everyone's on a single-payer government-based platform that system would be a primary target for cyber-warfare.  If people are already wondering whether the Russians have hacked our democratic process itself what could they do to a computerized health-care system, assuming the Russians have, in fact, hacked an election.  It's possible that those who wanted HRC in office have vastly over-estimated what Russian hacking has been able to accomplish.  And the other problem is that mainstream liberalism seems eager to impute the blame to white racism, misogyny and other variables that, while no doing being variables, can still be construed as blame-shifting or a false zero-sum game.  We don't have to be committed to the idea that the only reasons HRC lost the electoral vote was because Republicans are evil, Democrats can be evil, too.  Both parties are, quite possibly, equally evil really, but when you've committed to the ideological stances of one platform or the other it's easier to excuse your team's evil while not doing so for the other.  The disastrous campaign in Vietnam took both parties to be the disaster it was but there's nothing like red and blue clichés to insist that "they" are more responsible for those atrocities than "we" are. 

So even if the DNC and RNC have their respective issues, there's no need to think of the mix of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon as somehow being a conglomerate scapegoat for the disasters we perceive in the direction of democracy.  If our entire civilization is in some kind of informational death spiral blaming any one set of companies or parties won't suffice for a compelling or accurate explanation.  But we seem to live in an era where it has never been more appealing for partisans to scapegoat one group or entity for a cultural malaise that is manifesting in every organ of society. 

over at The National Review, Jonah Goldberg proposes that political dysfunction is not a zero-sum game and that maybe BOTH the DNC and RNC are in shambles and bereft of anything other than an "at least we're not THEM" quips while displaying similar internal collapse

A little surprised that a piece like this would appear at The National Review but it appeared at The National Review so ...

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453385/democrats-republicans-both-parties-dysfunctional-unhealthy

...

 

Donna Brazile, the longtime high-ranking Democratic functionary, was made interim chair of the party shortly before the 2016 election in the wake of revelations that the previous chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, seemed to be playing favorites in the primaries, tilting the scales toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Hacks, Brazile reports that Wasserman Schultz wasn’t simply partial toward Clinton. She was in fact Clinton’s vassal.

 

 

It’s widely known that Barack Obama left the Democratic party in shambles. On his watch, the party lost more than 1,000 elective offices at the federal, state, and local levels. One underreported reason for this is that Obama opted to create a parallel institution out of his 2012 campaign outfit, Organizing for America. The renamed Organizing for Action siphoned money and the president’s energies from the DNC.

 

 

Brazile reports that the party was so hollowed out with debt that Hillary Clinton essentially scooped it up in a distress sale. Wasserman Schultz cut a deal with the Clinton campaign in which Clinton would raise millions ostensibly for the party, particularly at the state level. But those funds were sluiced back into the Clinton campaign coffers in Brooklyn, and the campaign extracted de facto control of the party’s messaging and hiring. Team Clinton mocked Sanders as a paranoid dotard for claiming that the Democratic primary system was rigged against him. As it happens, his paranoia didn’t go far enough.

 

 

It seems axiomatic that any party weak enough to be taken over by Hillary Clinton is not in good health.

 

 

Today, the Democratic party’s sole unifying principle is opposition to Donald Trump. Given Trump’s standing in the polls, that may be good enough for the 2018 midterm elections. But when it comes to ideas about governing, all of the passion is reserved for two things.

 

 

First, there is Sanders’ idea of “socialism,” which is really an unworkable stew of banalities and nostrums stemming from a nostalgic idea of a “Scandinavian model” that no longer exists (if it ever did). It’s as if Fabian socialists created an Epcot Center exhibit of Sweden in the 1950s, and irascible tour guide Bernie rides by in a trolley, shouting: “This could be us!”

 

 

The second source of passion is the angry, sanctimony-besotted identity politics popular on college campuses and a handful of left-wing websites. The DNC’s data-services manager recently sent out an email soliciting applications for new hires in the IT department. She cautioned that she wasn’t looking for any “cisgender straight white males.”

 

 

If you want to know how Trump was elected, ask yourself how a laid-off, cisgender, straight, white, male coal miner who went back to community college to learn computers might react to that.

 

 

Again, you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking the GOP is like a runaway fire at a soiled-diaper-reclamation center. And I’m sure I’ll have opportunities in the near future to expand on that.

 

 

But the important point is that dysfunction isn’t zero-sum. Right now, the best argument Republicans have is “we’re not Democrats,” and the best argument Democrats have is “we’re not Republicans.” Like two punch-drunk pugilists leaning on each other in the twelfth round, if one falls, the other may well fall too.

 

 

Everywhere else in America today, disrupters — Uber, Amazon, etc. — are dismantling established institutions. Perhaps both political parties are the next institutions to crumble under creative destruction. Or maybe not. But if it happens, no one can say they didn’t have it coming.

I don't think the differences between the RNC and DNC are as big as partisans for either one of them may insist on believing those differences to be.  It's not just about platforms on paper but about internal dynamics.  Just because the RNC has been in some sense hijacked by loyalists to an entitled American aristocratic clan full of scabrous people doesn't mean the DNC hasn't had the same problem.  Whether the clan is called Bush or Trump or Clinton or Kennedy or Reagan having a set of de facto lords running a house of government doesn't seem like the most encouraging thing to observe about the United States.  At least the house of lords has been official somewhere else. 

A year ago there were authors at Slate so certain that it was impossible for Trump to actually win they took pains to write about how creepy it would be should Trump ever actually win.  We had a comedian or two confident that Trump just could not possibly win.

But the best the two parties have managed to say about each other is "have you seen them!?"  That's not really good enough.  "I'm with her" was not good enough.  "Make America Great Again" isn't good enough, either.  Who says America is going to be great again?  Who says America already is great?  The sorts of people for whom it's already great and who can command gigantic speaking fees to share how it's already great in America.  If the best the big two parties can do is to complain about the graft and intellectual dishonesty of the other set of plutocrats both parties are sick, potentially beyond cure.

We couldn't have gotten to the point where Trump has the executive branch if there hadn't been a serious collapse of cohesion and vision in both of the parties.  At this point it seems improbable that, any slogans chanted withstanding, that anybody in the plutocratic ranks will actually get locked up.  We're in an era in which tech and aggregating media giants can basically say for the record their loyalty is to their own internal policies first and foremost but that might be best designated as a separate post

 

a very belated riff on Kyle Borg's "The Monster We Created" blogpost about councils, brands, names and celebrities in American Christian scenes

A bit more than a year ago I saw this blog post linked to at Phoenix Preacher.  Earlier this year the former public relations person for what used to be Mars Hill Church published a book about how public relations matters and how your church needs to get engaged with public relations if it's going to survive and/or thrive in today's technologically savvy scene.  Still mulling over whether or not to actually review that book. 

I've tried to make a point of at least reading post-MH published books that discuss the church because, as I noted with the Dale Soden book, it's disappointing to see academic publications so far toe a fairly pedestrian line about Mars Hill as a whole was the religious right striking back.  I can attest that I met some people in my time at Mars Hill who were staunch Democrats, some people who think that Abraham Lincoln is a war criminal, neo-conservatives, Rand fans, and people who advocated for progressive/socialist policies, all people who believed in Jesus Christ risen from the dead.  I loved that about the Mars Hill scene.  I loved that real, sometimes even combative difference in political views could be retained by a core Christian profession.  But as the brand solidified within Mars Hill as a culture that brand solidified around the personality of one guy, a guy who reportedly said "I am the brand". 

Now as potentially a trickle of academic publications may emerge that deal with Mars Hill there's another sort of publication, courtesy of Justin Dean, about how your church needs PR to make it in today's world and he seems to believe that Mars Hill wasn't able to take all the hits they got from liberal and secular media.  Last I checked Janet Mefferd wasn't secular or liberal when she confronted Mark Driscoll on the air about A Call to Resurgence being full of what she regarded as plagiarism.  What Driscoll called a call to resurgence ended up being a focal point in a controversy surrounding the intellectual integrity of his published work.  At this point I've heard a couple of interviews Justin Dean has given in podcasts about the decline of Mars Hill and hostility from secular/liberal media.  That was not what damaged the reputation of Mars Hill so badly.  When the Andrew Lamb disciplinary situation became a national headline Justin Dean clarified that it wasn't the intent to harm Andrew but that due to unclear communication something that was only supposed to be circulated among a small group of people became known campus-wide.

Even in Ruth Graham's 2012 Slate article she could note that fellow evangelicals were expressing concern about Mars Hill's disciplinary culture and the nature of Driscoll's leadership in it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2012/02/mars_hill_pastor_mark_driscoll_faces_backlash_over_church_discipline_case_.single.html

So if an author at Slate could recognize that serious criticism of the Mars Hill culture was an intra-evangelical concern then Justin Dean's belief that the struggle Mars Hill faced was from secular and liberal media is a vision of Mars Hill history that is, while understandably partisan, all the more blinkered if that's the narrative he's committed to.  Longtime readers of this blog might even remember that when the Andrew Lamb disciplinary case came up in coverage I wrote that I found it hard to feel sorry for a guy who said he regarded the membership covenant of Mars Hill like an end user licensing agreement on iTunes that he just signed without really thinking about it.

But then there was Justin Dean's response:
...

Before now, Mars Hill’s only response has been posting an excerpt on church discipline from Driscoll’s 2009 book Vintage Church on its website and an opaque tweet from Driscoll. But Justin Dean, the church’s PR and marketing manager, agreed to answer my questions by email to tell the church’s side of the story.

One key element that was not clear in Andrew’s original account, Dean told me, was that the letter was intended to be read aloud, not posted online, and only to a “handful” of people. Instead, the group leader received unclear instructions and posted the letter online, a move Dean insists was not meant to hurt Andrew. [emphasis added]

Furthermore, says Dean, only the approximately 15 members of Andrew’s small group, who met regularly and knew one another well, had access to the letter on the City. (Though Andrew was blocked from accessing the City, he says the letter was available to a slightly wider circle, including his fellow security volunteers.) “His case was not shared with the full church and had, until he posted it publicly online, only been known by a handful of people who were involved in his life and cared deeply about him,” Dean said. (Confusing social-media privacy settings strike again!) He added that Driscoll was not involved in the case at all. Mars Hill currently has 5,417 members and just nine ongoing church discipline cases.

As I've written before, the explanation that something ended up on The City where the content was supposed to only be read aloud to a small group, a process that led to apparently a whole Mars Hill campus worth of members to know about the situation, came across for the public record like Justin Dean's best defense of how things went down from the perspective of Mars Hill leadership was to plead simple communicative incompetence.

Even if we were to all take at face value an assertion that Mars Hill leadership didn't know how to cope with hostile coverage from secular and liberal media (which we shouldn't, since everything from Mark Driscoll's 1998 Mother Jones interview up through 2011 articles featuring Mars Hill leadership in any and all mass media suggest that the church had a meteoric rise in the preceding decade by actively courting mass media) if we could identify any single incident that began to distill and embody public controversy surrounding Mars Hill in a way that could be said to catalyze its downward spiral in public reputation, how Justin Dean handled the public relations crisis of a single church discipline case might very well be the "pivot" to study. 

One of the things that Justin Dean will want to keep thinking about is the nature of a church culture in which a disgraced former member could decide that the best thing to do would be to take something that was disclosed on The City, which was Mars Hill's online member social network at the time, and disclose that to a journalist outside of Mars Hill.  Let's try to put this another way, Dean had to have realized at some level that a church culture as technologically dependent upon and savvy in social and mass media use would have to consider that if any members or leaders or volunteers did have a falling out with the central leadership culture that these would be people primed for using the technology the church had used to bolster its brand to weaken its brand.  That's not to say that the goal was to weaken the brand, any number of former members and leaders who chose to speak out saw themselves as dedicated Christians who were concerned that the brand Mars Hill had become was prone to insularity, injustice and a betrayal of the path of following Christ with a leadership culture of mass media propagandists rather than shepherds.  That's my take, in case you hadn't inferred this already. 

In many respects it's better to be back in arts blogging and discussing animation and classical guitar and chamber music and things like that.  This blog has probably one tenth the readership it had back in 2014 when the blog was temporarily dedicated to steady journalistic blogging about the life and times of Mars Hill.  But just as this has never been a dedicated watchdog blog it has also never had a moment where there was some "I'm done" or "I moved on" announcement or manifesto.  The negative impact of the culture of Mars Hill has been too pervasive and too readily misrepresented by the cliches of red and blue state  pseudo-Christian concerns for me to believe that there shouldn't be people willing to keep discussing Mars Hill and its history.  There are cases in which a genuinely ecumenical and scholarly discussion of what happened should continue and I think that the history of what used to be Mars Hill is one of those cases.  I've "moved on" in the sense that I've gotten back to blogging about music, composition, animation and other topics I love to write about but I haven't "moved on" in the advisory sense that former Mars Hill pastors and staff might have used, which means never writing about Mars Hill and treating the whole thing as in the past and we're here and now and let's just push forward because there's no benefit in looking back on the fiasco of what was.

Well if the authors of biblical books took that approach we wouldn't have gotten the Book of Judges in the Bible, would we?  So clearly authors of Scripture, guided and prompted by the Holy Spirit,  were inspired to document the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by God's people for our edification.  Yes, edification.  One of the most necessarily edifying things we can do in our study of Scripture is to be everywhere from it reminded of the atrocities and evils those of us who call ourselves God's people have perpetrated either in His name or, far more often, for the sake of our glory while pretending to do so for His name. 

Now a guy like Mark Driscoll could decide to tweet that nobody ever made a monument to a critic ...
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/statuses/164432787133317121

and yet here we are at the quincentennial of Martin Luther having decided to publicly criticize what he regarded as corruption within the Roman Catholic church.

We're also here in a world where a mere five years ago there was still a Mars Hill Church and Mark Driscoll's reputation was at its peak.  And now it's all gone like the Joker's pencil in The Dark Knight.

So here we are in 2017 and Justin Dean's got a book out called PR Matters.  It's inspired me to belatedly return to soemthing somebody blogged last year. 

http://gentlereformation.com/2016/09/12/the-monster-we-created-councils-brand-names-and-celebrities/

...

This monster of brand names and platforms, flourishes in an environment that encourages consumerism. What is often being promoted seems, at least to me, to be a small step above a marketing scheme, showbiz, or a strange form of entertainment. After all, to get headlines you only need the right key-note speaker; or pick the right target audience; or include the right adjectives–scandalous, inexhaustible, radical, extravagant; or affix the right logo; or define the right narrative and wrap it all up in terms of the gospel and you’ve got a recipe for success that’s too big to fail. The result is that the ordinary means-Word, sacrament, and prayer-are replaced by an extra-ordinary method of advertising. [emphasis added] That begins to look a lot like the self-ambition that, though it may have the right goal, is borne out of what should be an intolerable greed. Jesus is not a means to the end of promoting a brand name or platform, he is the end itself. That’s the monster we’ve created.

This monster of celebri-fying pastors flourishes in an environment that cultivates spiritual dangers for these men. We have watched and read with sadness the moral failures and downfall of those we have happily heaped demands, pressures, publicity, exposure, expectations, and contracts upon. Their failures have been many, and their failures–failures like adultery, cult-like leadership styles, domineering personalities, scandalous coverups, egoism, unentreatability, lack of self-control, manipulation, spiritual abuse, abandonment of community, family strife, doctrinal error, etc–have all been seen by the public eye to the shame of the church and the dishonor of Jesus. While they bear the responsibility for their sin it must be asked if the culture that has been created fosters conceit, yields double-standards, feeds pride, and sets mere men on high places and slippery slopes from which they are prone to fall for lack of footing. That’s the monster we’ve created.

...

I two-thirds agree.  I would suggest that in the sense that the consumption gets done by masses of people we play a substantial role but the apparatus of formulating and disseminating brands would be the work of propagandists, to keep getting back to the writings of Jacques Ellul on propaganda I've been blogging about this year.  Ellul's proposal that the new aristocracy that has placed itself above any meaningful democratic discourse would be propagandists could have some merit.  Conservatives will say that it's the media and that would be right in the sense of the medium but progressives have been complaining about how conservative the financial owners of media production are and they are, in a different way, equally right. 

Christian circles that have adopted the brand as equivalent to substance can make this mistake to the left or to the right in the United States. 

A super-majority of what's written here about megachurch pastors will generally not apply to actual local church pastors who love and serve in their local church and serve their local community.

If Justin Dean actually believes that your church or anybody's church in the United States somehow can't thrive without public relations I just disagree.  He's got to know that plenty of Christian communities have gone some distance without public relations.   If, and this is a very, very big "if" leaning toward "no" for me, we're even going to grant that a contemporary American church "needs" someone handling public relations the last person who should be handling that would seem to be the shepherd.  Driscoll stopped being a shepherd a long time ago in the Mars Hill scene, and may have forgotten what actually being a shepherd entails if he ever knew to begin with. 

I've increasingly come to the conviction that the problem with American Christianity in its entirety is that we have duped ourselves into thinking that the role of pastor is better conceived of in post-Billy Graham terms as a thought-leader or a public figure or as part of the propagandist caste.  Shepherds had to be out where the sheep were and they stunk of that work and were considered lowly and disreputable in all sorts of ways.  Who would hold it against sheep that they are sheep?  On the other hand, shepherds didn't have the best street cred among those who herded livestock animals.  Years and years ago a former Mars Hill co-founding pastor, Mike Gunn, preached a sermon where he mentioned the low reputation shepherds had and mentioned, if memory serves, how a bad or incompetent shepherd might keep sheep grazing in one area so long the animals stripped the land of the ability to grow much greenery and that sheep needed to be kept moving.

For all the chorus among Driscoll's advocates and advocates for a positive legacy for Mars Hill saying that so many lives were touched; that so many baptisms happened; even in the peak Mars Hill period of 2012 Driscoll himself felt obliged to say of Mars Hill growth that it was not all transfer growth.  Nobody makes that kind of apologetic case if they don't think there's a case to be made that most of the Mars Hill growth in 2010-2012 hadn't been precisely that, transfer growth of people switching brands rather than people experiencing observable conversions. 

What Mark Driscoll may have left in his wake could be likened to the creation of an even-more-Burned-Over district.  It's not that nobody came to Christ but that's not the point because we could simply propose that a real monergist would say the Holy Spirit deserves all the ultimate credit for conversions anyway.  Mars Hill dudes can't deserve any credit for the Holy Spirit convicting people of sin.  They can, however, deserve all the blame for creating a culture in which the role of the Christian shepherd was transformed in the Seattle region in a particular church context into the role of being a media-savvy propagandist more fixated on the quality of the Mars Hill brand than the state of the souls who were part of the Mars Hill community.

Which is not at all saying this was necessarily the case at the campus level.  In fact I could name a few names at the campus level where there were men and women of good faith and integrity doing what they could in a church they felt was where the Lord wanted them to be.

Refusing to demonize anyone for loyalty to Mars Hill as a community of believers was probably no small part of why sources trusted me with sensitive information, but I've written about that in the past already.

If the masses entreated Aaron to make a god for them and Aaron complied the masses bear their guilt, just as Aaron was guilty of fashioning the golden calf.  It is absolutely good and necessary to remember that as idol factories go the crafters of the idols are always, as a saying goes, providing a supply for an existing demand.

Atlantic contributor discusses how neuro-imaging research has to overcome it's bias toward white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic college student sampling base to be more reliable

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/how-a-focus-on-rich-educated-people-skews-brain-studies/544499/

In 1986, the social psychologist David Sears warned his colleagues that their habit of almost exclusively studying college students was producing a strange and skewed portrait of human nature. He was neither the first to make that critique, nor the last: Decades later, other psychologists noted that social sciences tended to focus on people from WEIRD societies—that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The results of such studies are often taken to represent humanity at large, even though their participants are drawn from a “particularly thin and rather unusual slice” of it.

The same concerns have been raised in virtually every area of science that involves people. Geneticists have learned more about the DNA of people in Europe and North America than those in the rest of the world, where the greatest genetic diversity exists. The so-called Human Microbiome Project was really the Urban-American Microbiome Project, given that its participants were almost entirely from St. Louis and Houston.

Neuroscience faces the same problems. When scientists use medical scanners to repeatedly peer at the shapes and activities of the human brain, those brains tend to belong to wealthy and well-educated people. And unless researchers take steps to correct for that bias, what we get is an understanding of the brain that’s incomplete, skewed, and,  well, a little weird.
...

Also known as white, educated, industrial, rich and democratic if memory serves, in Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.  What seems like the normal base line for intellectual and ethical thought to white liberal college students can turn out to have very little correspondence with the thoughts and ethics of people from other parts of the world. 

Another way to put this general observation is to suggest that American college students and researchers alike may not understand that what they consider to be the findings of science may be the findings of unexamined and unrecognized modes of cultural imperialism.  :) 

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic writes about the trio of ingredients in the doom spiral of liberalism: low birth rates, anti-immigration sentiment, and the fragility of the welfare state

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/immigration-modern-liberalism/543744/

Here are three trends that are often discussed in isolation:

1. The low birth rates of advanced economies
2. The rise of a xenophobic anti-immigration politics
3. The fragility of the welfare state

While these subjects might seem to have nothing to do with each other, in fact they crash into each other like dominos. As rich countries have fewer babies, they need immigration to grow their prime-age workforces. But as the foreign-born share of the population rises, xenophobia often festers and threatens egalitarian policymaking.

 

There is no reason to think that this cause-and-effect is inevitable, but the trend is clear enough that liberal policymakers need to think hard about this doom loop and how to break it. Let’s spell it out in greater detail.

 

First, babies. American demographers are “freaking out” as each year brings a new record low in the number of women giving birth. There are several ways to cut the fertility data—including annual births per population, or total lifetime births per woman. But every statistic tells the same story: Americans are having fewer babies than they were 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. Japan and many European countries are dealing with their own “perfect demographic storms.”

...

or as some of my older friends have put it, the demographic decline in citizens giving birth means that we're reaching the point where the number of old people who will be expecting to draw from Social Security is larger than the number of under-retirement age employed people who are actually able to pay into the system and that would be now, let alone in the future.   Now there are a handful of self-identified conservatives I know who say the smartest response to this should be the most lenient and generous immigration policies we can provide because it's not the native-born American citizens who are necessarily willing to do the jobs that immigrants are often doing now.  Give all those immigrants full citizenship and the rights thereof and they can pay taxes. 

But, as Thompson notes, anti-immigration sentiments can be widespread in first-world nations and not just the United States.

A baby shortage sounds like an adorable misfortune of middling significance. Actually, it’s a critical problem. To expand their economies, countries need to expand their populations, particularly at a time of low productivity growth. Rich countries also need a larger and richer workforce to pay for government services to the sick, poor, and elderly. In the long term, with automation, these countries may run out of jobs. But in the short term, they are running out of people. In fact, the number of Americans between 25 and 54 years old has not grown in more than a decade.

 

That brings us to the second story: immigrants. As the birth rate has declined in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, the immigrant share of their populations has increased. This is a perfectly natural and good development. These countries have high median incomes, which are attractive to international migrants, plus their economies need new humans to sustain both GDP growth and government services.

 

This might sound counterintuitive to some people who’d assume that a large influx of low-skilled immigrants would be a huge drag on federal resources. In the short term, they might be. But as the children of immigrants find jobs and pay taxes, immigrant families wind up being a net contributor to the government over many decades, according to a 2016 report from the National Academy of Sciences. Beyond this economic accounting, there is a strong moral case to allow families from low-income countries move to a richer country, where they can improve their lot by an order of magnitude.

Something I've discussed with a progressive friend over the years is that the last thing the United States needs is free college for everybody.  Longtime readers know I'm not against education and I'm slogging through Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and Gadamer's Truth and Method right now, so it's not like I'm against ideas and stuff. 

That said, there are enough legitimate concerns as to why college is or should be necessary for employment on the one hand and on the other hand enough legitimate concern as to whether or not the entire educational system has inequality cooked into it that education beyond high school doesn't seem to be what we need.  What we need is a more robust "unskilled labor market".  The extent to which people tout college as an answer for adding job skills is the extent to which I suspect these people have had the luxury of getting decent-paying jobs not long after they got out of college.  Some people get degrees and end up in scut jobs the rest of their lives. 

Which, in a way gets to the tension between immigration and resentment of immigration in relationship to the welfare state.  For anti-immigration sorts the illegal immigrants are the socio-economic vampires who suck up all the resources that, so the belief seems to go, would be going to real American citizens. 

...

This is where the story finally connects with welfare and the future of liberalism. Rich countries tend to redistribute wealth from the rich few to the less-rich multitude. But when that multitude suddenly includes minorities who are seen as outsiders, the white majority can turn resentful and take back their egalitarian promises. Take, for example, the Twin Cities of Minnesota. They were once revered for their liberal local policies—like corporate-tax redistribution from rich areas to poor neighborhoods and low-income housing construction near business districts. But since the 1980s, as the metro area attracted more nonwhite immigrants, the metro has become deeply segregated by income and race and affordable-housing construction has backtracked. Or take Finland, that renowned “Santa Claus State” of cradle-to-grave social services, where the welfare state is being “systematically dismantled.” The far right has emerged in the last few decades, just as foreign-born population has suddenly grown.


But as Charles Mudede wrote at The Stranger, racism against minorities has taken the form of despots in African nations blaming whites for economic troubles in African nations.  It can be so axiomatic in American journalism that far right=white racism against non-whites that we can forget that this isn't the only variant of institutional racism that's possible the world over, even if it's most certainly the dominant one in institutional terms in the United States.

Still ... take note of Finland, or any of its neighbors.  Americans with blue or left leanings have in the last decade floated the idea that we could try to retool our economy and social structure to be more like one of the Nordic countries.  That's a wildly improbable idea and even if it could be implemented, nations like Norway, Sweden and Finland are more culturally and ethnically monolithic overall than the United States can, should or even has been in its history.  It's not like xenophobia and wildly stringent immigration policies can't happen in the Nordic realm. 

Years ago there was a guy I knew who intended to expatriate to Finland or one of those countries and he discovered there was no way they would ever grant him citizenship for reasons that don't need to be enumerated in much detail.  A short version is there was a psych screen and an assessment of what could be regarded as criminal record issues and the answer was a pre-emptive and permanent "no". 

What some discovered here in the United States when considering heading north into Canada in the wake of Trump's election is that a nation that can be more generous in terms of social and healthcare issues at a number of levels is more stringent across the board about customs and immigration. You can't just head up to Canada these days, apparently.  As Fredrik DeBoer was noting a while back, even the Scandaniavian healthcare utopias touted by American leftists don't exist so much any more as the governments have shifted toward privatizing elements of care. 

Being the sort of pessimist that I am I would suggest that communism failed and capitalism fails and that nothing like socialism, if by socialism we mean that the workers as a whole actually own the means of production, will ever happen in the history of the human race.  It's easier to believe Jesus rose from the dead and will return to rule and reign with a new heaven and earth than to believe that the socialist future predicted in Marxist thought will ever happen in this world. 

The only sure thing is that humans will keep commodifying and exploiting themselves regardless of what formal ideologies are used to do so; it can be done with Marxism and capitalism in equal measure as even the most cursory survey of global history in the last two centuries can more or less generally establish.  Are there exceptions?  Maybe, but do those exceptions apply at the level of global powers?  Not so far as I've been able to see, and the colonialist empires of Europe are in demographic decline and maybe deserve to be.  America didn't get its globalist colonialist tendencies out of the blue, we inherited that sense of cultural entitlement from European forebears. 

It's not always clear to me these days that if Western civilization as we know it dies the world will really be worse off.  In global ecological terms the complete collapse of Western civilization might be a net benefit.  If the empires of the future are China and Japan, so be it.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/10/24/china_and_japan_both_have_their_most_powerful_and_secure_leaders_in_decades.html

This is a topic where writers and editors at The New Republic shouldn't act as though it's even a bad thing that Trump could lead the world to regard China rather than the United States as the up and coming global superpower.

https://newrepublic.com/article/140081/trump-paving-way-china-rule-world
...
China is now closer to the international norm than the U.S. on such key issues as trade, climate change, and Israel-Palestine. Is America at risk of abdicating its international leadership role to China, just as the British Empire did in 1945?

Why not regard the United States as culturally and economically being a spent force, bankrupt to the point where there's no point in attempting to salvage it? 

Maybe the British could be philosophical about the sun setting on their empire because through those upstart Americans their capacity to shape the entire fate of the planet was, however indirect, still in some sense assured.  So British fantasy and sci-fi could afford James Bond and Doctor Who during the period in which we were running with Star Trek and the Planet of the Apes.  Americans could imagine re-making or completely breaking the world while the Brits could imagine helping out a little here and there for the sake of a proper cause.

What if the "advanced economies" all deserve to collapse?  It's something I've been thinking about as I've read progressive and conservative polemics about the ways to best preserve or redistribute resources.  Redistribution only makes sense if we can safely assume that what is being redistributed is legitimate wealth with no ethical reservations to possibly be had about it.  But what if our entire system of fractionally reserved fiat currency is a sham?  Then envying the upper one percent because they are part of an information manipulation scheme seems crazy.  That's not wealth in the way of land or food or natural resources or human labor, that's just manipulated data points.  If our economics of fossil fuels is as perilous to the future of the global ecosphere as conservationists and environmentalists think it is then wouldn't the entire film industry that isn't strictly digital film be a count against the art form of film as an ecological disaster?   Sometimes it seems as if there's a weird irony in the entertainment industries being concerned about anthropogenic climate change because I can't help see a trailer for a film like GeoStorm and wonder whether the cumulative carbon footprint of such a film is justified by the warning the film might purport to provide about global warming. 

Which in a way gets to something I've been thinking about from my college days.  I knew a Lutheran who said the Puritans were emphatically anti-arts.  I wondered about that since Puritans wrote like they literally had nothing else to do!  They couldn't have been anti-literature as a whole.  But what if we thought of the Puritan skepticism about opera and theater as being based on what they regarded as the profligate and predatory nature of its participants?  I.e. what if they saw in theater the Harvey Weinsteins of their time and regarded these mean as contemptible and said so?  Arts professors might like to remember the Bard and remember how fantastic all the art was that the Puritans had skepticism about.  It's possible for the art to be beautiful but to still reflect a level of corruption and decadence that I nitself is not necessarily so praiseworthy.

To piggyback on an old ribbon farm essay, it seems American culture prizes people seeking to be bards rather than chimney sweeps when what the health of a society may ultimately require is more people being willing to be chimney sweeps rather than bards. granting a sketchy part of the analogy in the sense that around Puget Sound people would advise we get rid of the fossil fuel energy grid altogether.  We can do that ... but I don't know if they've thought through all the social and demographic implications of a bunch of old people whose continuing survival hinges on plastic parts. 

company behind the fearless girl statue has ended up settling a gender discrimination suit

For those who remember the Fearless Girl statue, you might remember that not everybody considered it a legitimate or honest tribute to girl power or feminism.  There was a piece at Hyperallergic we linked to a while back.

http://hyperallergic.com/364474/the-sculpture-of-a-fearless-girl-on-wall-street-is-fake-corporate-feminism/

Last night, I spent half an hour with “Fearless Girl,” the bronze sculpture created by artist Kristen Visbal and installed by financial firm State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Wall Street for International Women’s Day. I watched people pose for photos with her in nonstop succession — young and old, male and female, literally everyone wanted their picture taken with “Fearless Girl.” I listened to a young man compare “Fearless Girl” to his sister. I got yelled at by a group of photo-takers for blocking the view of “Fearless Girl” confronting the “Charging Bull.” I heard a man who was shooting a long exposure of “Fearless Girl” strike up a conversation with a nearby woman about the sculpture. “It’s complex,” he said. “It IS complex!” she exclaimed. Another man joined the conversation and offered that “Fearless Girl” was “pretty profound.”
Having witnessed all of this firsthand, I do not think it’s a stretch to say “Fearless Girl” represents basically everything that’s wrong with our society.
 
Here is the narrative being spun about “Fearless Girl”: An advertising firm and a financial services firm got together to drop a “remarkable,” “guerrilla” sculpture of a young girl in front of Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” in the middle of the night. The girl is part of a campaign to encourage companies to increase the number of women on their boards. The girl “is a remarkable evolution for Wall Street.” The girl might even represent “the turning point of gender equality in corporate America.” The girl “celebrates all the people who resisted by staying in place.” If installed permanently, the girl would be “a constant source of strength” for women who work in the vicinity.

That’s fuzzy and inspiring and stuff, but here is the truth about “Fearless Girl”: It features a branded plaque at its base. The companies that installed it had a permit. They are advertising firm McCann New York — whose leadership team has only three women among 11 people, or 27% women — and asset manager SSGA — whose leadership team has five women among 28 people, or 18% women. SSGA is a division of State Street, which has a board of directors that includes only 27% women. SSGA is also, according to Wikipedia, the world’s third-largest asset manager, managing more than $2.4 trillion in assets in 2014. And, like any good capitalist behemoth, it has some shady dealings in its history — like the time the SEC charged State Street with misleading investors during the subprime mortgage crisis. Or the class-action lawsuit brought against it for mismanaging retirement funds. Or the over $64 million that the company agreed to pay in January to settle fraud charges brought by the government, as Nick Pinto pointed out in the Village Voice.

But don’t worry about those cheating Wall Streeters who can’t be bothered to take care with people’s investments and lives — “Fearless Girl” will stop them! She has, as a visitor commented last night, “no doubt” and “no fear”!

I spent International Women’s Day on strike and not looking very much at the news or my phone. When I heard about the stunt, sometime in the evening, I felt offense begin to bore a hole deep in my core. Could there possibly be anything more patronizing than two massive, male-dominated capitalist companies installing a branded statue of the most conceivably non-threatening version of womankind in supposed honor of a day devoted to women’s equality that was founded by the Socialist Party?

No, alas, I think there could not.
As I've written before, a few times, there's been nothing quite like the last year and a half to clarify the difference between liberals and leftists in Anglo-American contexts quite like the election of Trump. 

So for those authors who have, from the left, condemned the Fearless Girl statue as nothing more than pandering, self-serving fake corporate feminism, some new evidence for such a conclusion has emerged.

http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/sep/15/news/la-heb-internet-diseases-20100915

 

http://nypost.com/2017/10/05/firm-behind-fearless-girl-statue-underpaid-female-workers-feds/

 

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fearless-girl-settles-gender-discrimination-suit-1110587

Actually paying women employees better to begin with rather than commissioning, funding or in any way installing and promoting the Fearless Girl statute would have been better.
\



 

as Greg Kappas is being an officer connected with Mark Driscoll's new church plant it's worth asking what Kappas thinks will be different this time compared to the first church plant of Driscoll's he advised, Mars Hill

One of the things I've been thinking about since Throckmorton discussed the 990 forms of Mark Driscoll Ministries are those officers Tope Koleso and Greg Kappas.  That would be because of these things mentioned by Mark Driscoll decades ago.

http://web.archive.org/web/20001210191200/http://www.marshill.fm/who/our_history.htm
...
In the second season, Grace and I began attending Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, where we volunteered our time working with their college ministry. We then located in Seattle to be closer to students and after a few months I was brought on staff as a part-time intern to oversee the college group. I served in that position for nearly two years and learned a great deal in my first position of ministry leadership in a church. At that time I met Mike Gunn who had moved from a pastorate in Southern California to begin a ministry to athletes at the University of Washington. I also met Lief Moi, a local radio show host, who came in to teach a class for us. These two men and their wives and children became like family and together we began dreaming about the possibility of planting an urban church for an emerging postmodern generation in one of the least churched cities in the U.S. We began praying, studying the scriptures, reading a great deal on postmodernity, and dialoging together to formulate a philosophy of ministry appropriate for our context. Helping us formulate our launch plan was Dr. Greg Kappas, who graciously mentored us and provided wise insight and counsel. [emphasis added]
asfsaf

The key is to make a sincere and devoted attempt to take with you other strong and capable men who are well respected and potential elders with you. And, getting them some pulpit time if/when they are capable and trustworthy also helps in perception.  For example, when I started I had Mike Gunn and Lief Moi with me. And, they have been two of the richest blessings God has ever given me in ministry. Both have theological education, lots of ministry experience, lots of pulpit experience, are older and have outstanding families. And, I had worked with them for a few years at our sending church and they were very close friends and godly men with wives of great character. So, from the beginning it was clear that we were working together and that they were also to be respected and followed. They have, to their credit, called me face to face on my sins and pride. And, each time they have they were right. They have never done this in public and have always been my biggest encouragement and covered my back at every turn. Because of their age they could have made my life difficult and been divisive. But, this has never ever been an issue. I am all for a team type concept, but the hard part is getting real biblical elders who qualify for their office with families of particular honor. Today, I would have to say that our elders are a tremendous honor and safety zone for me to work from who have faithfully guided our church through some very difficult places and I thank God for each of the men every day. Also, their wives are outstanding mothers and teachers of women who have been outstanding allies and partners in our work.

In addition, strong capable men who also have their own churches are good to sit under the authority of, particulalry for a young man. For example, Dr. Greg Kappas was a church planting coach to me and a tremendous help, encouragement, and advocate. He had planted his own churches, taught church planting at Western Seminary, and helped oversee a regional network of church planters. To this day Greg remains like a brother and his counsel has always been much needed and appreciated. And, my father in law Gib Martin planted his church over 35 years ago and remains there as the lead pastor and is also a great help and cheerleader who has been very very supportive and available. And, Dr. David Nicholas with the Spanish River Church and now Acts 29 has at least as much insight into planting as any man I have ever met and he and I are very very close and in contact weekly as I am with Gib and Greg. In addition, I've had the privilege of meeting thousands of other pastors across the U.S. and gleaning from their experience and wisdom.  Overall, I must admit I have been very very blessed by God. My life shows His grace in some very clear ways and the men He has called me into relationships with have really been life changing.


and yet as we've noted earlier.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-question-about-narrative-of-real.html

"Yet according to the narrative Mark and Grace Driscoll presented in Real Marriage in 2012 there was nobody they felt they could talk to about what was sexually dysfunctional in their own marriage?  By the Driscolls' account Grace's family was one of Mark's particular points of unhappiness in the earlier years of the marriage (see pages 10-11 in Real Marriage).  So in spite of public statements of praise and affection for Gib Martin, Real Marriage has since revealed that the private reality of Mark Driscoll's sentiments toward his father-in-law may have been a bit more resentful, by Mark and Grace Driscoll's account, than what Mark Driscoll put on the old marshill.fm site.

Or ... another possibility is that the narrative in Real Marriage is so difficult to square with so many years of public testimony given by Mark Driscoll about how intimately he was known by the co-founding pastors of Mars Hill and the regard with which he held his father-in-law and Grace's family that the narrative of Real Marriage could actually raise more questions about the early documented history of Mars Hill as conveyed by Mark Driscoll than it may answer.  IF Mark Driscoll's marriage was so fraught how are we supposed to understand the co-founding pastors of Mars Hill not being aware of this?  Was this because the Driscoll's didn't share that?  Did the others in the earlier years of Mars Hill just not observe that something was wrong?  "

So, to put it another way, Greg Kappas is an officer in Mark Driscoll Ministries these days but decades ago he was involved in advising the launch plan for what would become Mars Hill Church.

So with that background in mind a question that lingers is why Greg Kappas might think things will be more likely to end better this time?  Given the way things ended at Mars Hill what does Kappas think can be done differently now?  Consider the way Driscoll described his conversion process in "Seasons of Grace" way back at the dawn of the millennium.

In the first season, in the fall of 1989, God was in the process of drawing me unto Himself. While attending Washington State University I began reading such classics as Augustine and Aquinas, and read through the New Testament in less than two weeks from the Bible my girlfriend Grace gave me as a high school graduation present . Aware of what God was orchestrating, but still unyielding in my heart, I had one Christian friend who asked me over a burger one late night what I was planning on doing for my career. I told him that God was going to make me a Christian and send me out to plant churches like I had read about Paul. He laughed, unsure if I was mocking him, being serious, or trying to discourage him from giving me any more goofy tracts. Within a month, my lingering struggles with the Gospel disappeared and I began teaching a Bible study and attending a solid church pastored by Doug Busby. In the spring of 1990 I attended my first retreat and after a late night of worship with a few hundred farmers and college professors I knelt down by an Idaho river and prayed. It was at that time that I quite unexpectedly received my call. God told me, "Mark, I have called you out from among many to lead men." I then began to serve in leadership for a ministry, and also became the editor for the opinions section of the campus newspaper; an adventure that included bomb threats, protests, and a handful of heated public debates. Grace transferred to WSU and we were married in the summer before my senior year. Upon graduation Grace and I moved to Seattle without a place to live, jobs to pay the bills, or a church to attend, but determined to somehow begin planting churches.

"Quite unexpectedly" Driscoll wrote, despite having just a few sentences earlier written that he declared he was going to be made a Christian by God, who would send Mark Driscoll out to plant churches like Mark said he'd read about in Paul.

One of the tropes in American evangelical conversion experiences is to talk about how little X wanted to do Y but in the case of Mark Driscoll we see him recounting that he believed his career was going to be planting churches even before people, by Driscoll's own account, could be entirely sure they could believe Mark Driscoll was even a Christian.  So how could it be quite unexpected that God would call Mark Driscoll to do the stuff Mark Driscoll said he was willing to announce he would be doing as a career before even he might have considered himself a Christian within his own narrative? 

a piece at The Atlantic discusses how Hollywood and theater productions have gone fairly easy on Lyndon Johnson's legacy

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/lbj-in-popular-culture/542982/

 

 

...

 

Historians have not been as kind to LBJ as Hollywood when assessing his impact on America’s role in the world. Foreign-policy historians have produced important work in recent years showing how Vietnam was neither an inevitable mistake nor a military operation pushed on an unknowing president by advisers. Rather, a cohort of outstanding scholars has used archival records, particularly the White House presidential recordings, to show that Johnson very much knew the risks he was taking by accelerating this war, and repeatedly ignored the warnings of multiple advisers and colleagues who told him that a war in Vietnam was unnecessary and unwinnable. The most important work on this subject, Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War, brilliantly recounts how Johnson understood all of the risks associated with sending troops into this battle and heard repeatedly from southern hawks, liberal Democrats, and foreign leaders that a negotiated settlement would be better.

 

But as a result of both his machismo and his desperate efforts to prevent Republicans from attacking him as weak on defense, the same sort of baldly political calculation that brought him success on domestic policy, Johnson decided to escalate the American military presence in the deadly jungles of the region. Vietnam, according to Logevall, was the result of poor presidential decision making, mistaken calculations, and a commander in chief who fully understood the problems with this operation but moved forward anyway.

 

The time has come for a good film that captures this other side of LBJ: not the tragic leader but the culpable commander in chief, the president who sought to protect his political standing through disastrous decisions. Americans need to see a talented actor portray Johnson reading Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s famous 1965 memo, in which he wrote that “politically, it is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson Administration is in a stronger position to do so than any Administration in this century. 1965 is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson Administration. Indeed, it is the first year when we can face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right.” Cut to the next scene: Johnson kicks Humphrey out of his inner circle of advisers and only gives the hawks a seat at the table.

 

This Hollywood story of Lyndon Johnson’s failure is needed more urgently today than ever before. There is still a strong tendency to believe, against all odds, that the “political system” or the so-called “adults in the room” will somehow protect the United States from the worst instincts of a president when it comes to war and peace. Somehow, Americans say to themselves, democracy will survive dangerous presidential bluster, the emasculation of diplomacy, and constant militaristic threats.

...

A couple of years ago I proposed a unified theory to explain franchise nostalgia for sci-fi dystopian and utopian tales in American cinema, whether we're talking about Planet of the Apes and Star Trek from the 1960s or Star Wars, Terminator, Alien or Robocop from the 1980s (1979 for the Scott film, but it's conventional to "round up" for some films on the cusp of a new decade).  The proposal was simple, that we find clusters of franchises get rebooted in Hollywood that exemplify the dystopian or utopian concerns of two epochs that are retroactively considered blue state and red state political golden ears--the blue utopia is Camelot and the LBJ continuation thereof, while the red utopia is Reagan.

 

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/01/nostalgia-and-anxieties-of-empire.html

 

Neither of these were really utopian except as grist for myth-making of a partisan sort.   I've written about my belief that Star Trek as an entire half-century spanning franchise can be thought of as a type of cultural imperialism.

 

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/09/star-trek-as-both-propaganda-and-art.html

 

But it tends to not be recognized as cultural imperialism by people who embrace secularism and liberalism.  It's thought of as imagining a better future. The idea that Star Trek level technology is feasible, let alone that it would be manifest in a USS Enterprise rather than developed by a region in Africa or China and that its captain would be from Ohio still imagined that the future of the ideal world would originate in some fashion from the culture of the United States.  Conversely, dystopian narratives in which human life is nearly wiped out "can" be thought of as the bromide that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but I would suggest the problem is that bromide is too abstract and forgets that nationalism is still alive and well--it's more plausible to say that it's easier for Americans and the entire "first world nation" set to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the world moving forward without the United States or without the first world nations somehow being the "leaders" of all that is known as high culture in the West. 

But just because the JFK/LBJ era seems like a golden age in popular memory for the entertainment industry doesn't mean it was thought of being that at the time. 

One of the more pernicious side effects (or possibly goals?) of such a mythology of Camelot has been imagining that the JFK years were not as hawkish as they were and that on account of civil rights legislation the Johnson years could be defined more by that than military adventurism.  Another way of putting it is that perhaps thanks to the way Nixon handled the Vietnam conflict it's been easy for Democrats to imagine that Republicans are the war-mongers.  Republican administrations became adept at military adventurism that didn't require formal declarations of war but the war-declaring administrative eras have been staunchly Democratic in the history of the United States going back as far as Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned on not getting us into war when he planned to get us into war.  In that sense hawkish Republicans at least had the honesty to admit they were hawkish, dubious honor though that may be.