You remember Edmund Burke’s condescending and sexist response to poor Mary Wollstonecraft’s measured and rational defense of the French Revolution, right? Well, of course not, because it was other way around—Wollstonecraft responding to Burke (of course), and Wollstonecraft presenting the establishment argument (most British initially supported the Revolution) in sexist language—as Katherine O’Donnell reminds us: “Presenting herself as the rationalist answer to Burke’s emotionalism, Wollstonecraft played on masculine, British sentiment to impugn the Catholic, Irish – and therefore suspect – character of her opponent. Burke had also famously argued against criminalising sodomy, ‘an argument he hadn’t won’, O’Donnell recalls. Whether or not Wollstonecraft was trying to remind her readers of this ‘effeminate’ or ‘sodomitical’ stance by the Irishman, O’Donnell says: ‘Wollstonecraft uses a sexist and nationalistic rhetoric to announce her voice as she attacks Burke…In giving an immensely influential misreading of Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful where she accuses him of making beauty synonymous with woman and both characterised as ‘little, smooth, delicate, fair’, Wollstonecraft—quite unfairly—sets up Burke as the paradigm of the misogynistic patriarch.’”
A history of Ireland: “In his fine survey of the last half-millennium of Irish history, Dublin writer John Gibney makes the enormously complicated—and usually quite tragic—story of Ireland’s past understandable. A Short History of Ireland is a concise and highly readable account that starts with the Protestant Reformation and ends more or less in our own day. The book has five parts, one for each of the centuries he discusses, further divided into chapters exploring major themes. Each of the five parts closes with a section called ‘Where Historians Disagree,’ exploring points of scholarly contention. The first of these disputed historical questions is: ‘Why did the Reformation not succeed’ in Ireland?”
What holds multi-ethnic, Western nations together today? Not race or religion but this precarious thing called “a common culture,” says Alexander Zubatov: “As the mythological and religious bases of cultural cohesion began to decline in the West following the Enlightenment, the modern pluralistic nation-state emerged to fill the void. No longer composed of a single ‘people,’ the nation-state nonetheless still had to offer a solution to the hard problem of creating cultural unity and avoiding free-riding. A national identity had to be forged, a sense of what G.W.F. Hegel called ‘civil society,’ which could mediate between atomic individuals and the abstract geopolitical unity of the State. As the French historian Ernest Renan explained in an 1882 lecture entitled ‘What Is a Nation?’, a nation is not a matter of race or geography, but rather, ‘a soul, a spiritual principle,’ ‘a moral conscience,’ a people ‘having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present,’ ‘a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make.’”
The problem is America doesn’t really have a shared culture anymore. Zubatov writes that in place of “primitive tribal identifications of clan, ethnicity, and race, a new social compact is necessary in which a shared culture becomes our totem. For Americans of every creed and color to put aside their more obvious superficial differences, they need to be reading the same books, worshipping the same cultural or theological gods, and drawing upon the same traditions.” Those books—by Emerson, Whitman, Faulkner—may be read by some in college, but I doubt they are celebrated for their (sometimes problematic) portraits of national identity, which is partly Zubatov’s point. The only things we have left are the occasional TV series (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones), The Avengers, and the Super Bowl. Zubatov lauds the experience of “standing shoulder to shoulder, singing the same songs, cheering on the same teams, mourning the same losses, celebrating the same victories or just giving ourselves up to the simple, primal pleasure of chanting ‘USA! USA!’” But while watching the American men win curling at the Olympics may produce a nice little frisson, it’s hardly the strongest thread of national identity.
When my wife and I moved back to the States after five years abroad, I was struck by how difficult it could be to carry on a conversation with some of my fellow Americans because we hadn’t watched any recent TV shows. The point is that cultural “symbols” created by books and TV can be fleeting. A new generation nursed on different books and different shows changes the character of a nation in less than 30 years. A lasting national identity would have to start, it seems to me, with the family and with smaller but more robust traditions surrounding work, roles, food, and hospitality that are passed down from parents to children. Something like that remains in the South and other regions across the country, but it probably won’t last for much longer.
Speaking of the South, Julia Reed writes about those weird Southern names in Garden and Gun: “My two nieces are named Evans and Brooks. Which is where it gets confusing. I’ve got a male first cousin named Brooks and a male second cousin named Evans, which was also the name of his father and grandfather. All the recent generations of men not named Brooks or Evans are named Runcie, and all the women are either Julia or Frances. My cousin Brooks even married a woman named Frances, the name of his sister and mother and great-grandmother and probably plenty of girls further back than that. I am not qualified to venture into the Freudian implications of his choice (and this particular Frances is a fine human being), but it does make dividing the passed-down monogrammed linens super easy.”
This is what 200,000 stars look like.
Essay of the Day:
Librettist Oscar Hammerstein was dismissed by critics as sentimental and naïve. Kenneth Tynan wrote that The Sound of Music was suitable “for children of all ages, from six to about eleven and a half.” In Commentary, Terry Teachout explains how he and Rodgers transformed Broadway:
“Hammerstein then teamed up with Rodgers, whose long-standing collaboration with Lorenz Hart had been derailed by Hart’s alcoholism. It had already run its course in any case, for Hart was incapable of writing the books for his own shows, and he and Rodgers, both of whom longed to do more challenging work on Broadway, found it impossible as a result to realize their shared ambitions. When Rodgers invited Hammerstein to work on a musical version of Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play by Lynn Riggs about pioneer life in what would become the state of Oklahoma, Hammerstein accepted with alacrity.
“By then he had long since perfected his lyric-writing style, turning out songs that were noteworthy for their seemingly effortless combination of frank emotionalism and directness of utterance (‘Why was I born? / Why am I living?’). To this he now added an increased determination to do again what he and Kern had already done so well in Show Boat, writing an entire show in which the emotional stakes are involvingly high and every musical number is painstakingly integrated into the show’s dramatic arc, propelling it forward instead of standing apart from it.
“To this end, Rodgers and Hammerstein broke with Broadway tradition by reversing the order in which they wrote their songs. Instead of setting his lyrics to Rodgers’s preexisting tunes, Hammerstein usually wrote them first, after which Rodgers set them to music. This made it easier for them to break free from the rigid formal strictures of repeating-chorus ‘golden age’ popular song, and it also allowed Hammerstein to plunge further into his own deep well of feeling, thereby encouraging Rodgers to write music more expansive than the brilliant show tunes to which Hart had previously set his lyrics. In addition, Hammerstein shunned his predecessor’s elaborate wordplay, opting for straightforwardness (‘I can see the stars gittin’ blurry / When we ride back home in the surrey’) over Hart’s self-conscious virtuosity (‘I’m wild again! / Beguiled again! / A simpering, whimpering child again’).”
Photos: Southeast Alaska
Poem: Dave Smith, “Cow Story”
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