NeoVictorian discusses "Irish Democracy," the passive resistance of ordinary individuals to the dictates of their government.
As I've written before, I imagine that this is how the American Experiment will end. For all the fears of Soviet-style aggression to the reluctant, we forget that the American left has risen to power by appealing to the worst traits of humanity. The constituency they have created will be their downfall.
I'm not speaking of the hate-filled ranters of the media. I'm talking about the lazy, selfish and willfully ignorant. The Obamacare rollout is a perfect example: a crowd of wonks so assured of their intelligence but unable to accomplish anything. It seems that everyone involved just assumed that someone else was making it work.
I keep picturing the federal government as a pack mule. One lazy person after another hops on. For a while, it doesn't matter, but eventually the weight gets to be too much. The mule slows, then stops, then crumbles to the ground.
Son of Brock Landers at 28 Sherman has a good piece talking about this (in part). The system is built on giving blue voters a free ride, but were a couple of generations (at least) removed now and, not only do the recipients have no experience with thrift and hard work, the values have disappeared from their culture.
Having worked as many jobs as I've had, I've seen the results up close. Some people have a job set in front of them and simply can't get started. The concept that sometimes things aren't easy isn't there. Laziness isn't the right word; they're like cavemen looking at a rocket ship. They don't know what they're looking at.
Those are the worst of America, but moving up the ladder doesn't bring much hope. Over the years, ability has become less important than credentials and identity. But, like the pack mule, the system was strong--couldn't it take another imbecile with a degree?
The governments of America are composed of the same people you see behind the counter at the DMV. The have their processes, their required forms, but little connection to how it all works together. They have to rape a child in the office to get fired. That was fine for a while, I guess, but it eventually seeps into management.
If we continue on the path we've been on, what will happen is the wheels of government will grind slower and slower. The advantage of this will be that a parallel, functioning system can form to pick up the slack. Since this will be ad hoc and local, it will be effective and appropriate to the issues at play.
America got pretty far without a central government controlling everything. I'm betting that, in the red states, those values are only buried and not gone. After all, they were ones that were expected to carry the rest.
Friday, January 31, 2014
The Tilting of the Playing Field
Earlier this week, I wrote this piece talking about the dangers of unchecked corporate growth and the centralized state power that grows with it.
The Federalist follows up with some actual examples of corporations changing the playing field in their favor.
It's better to have many small pockets of economic and political power because it keeps the system dynamic and flexible. A thousand small businesses try more solutions than four giant businesses and are more likely to find the best ones. And, best, if one fails, then nothing vital is lost. The economy is built on a thousand small foundations, so the loss of one makes no difference.
In large systems like Wal-Mart or the federal government, the decision-makers are so removed from the individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy that the individuals become abstractions. This allows for decisions that devastate communities but pad the profit margin.
There is one flaw, though. An economy built on many small actors creates stability at the expense of exponential growth. But then, that doesn't sound so bad to me.
The Federalist follows up with some actual examples of corporations changing the playing field in their favor.
It's better to have many small pockets of economic and political power because it keeps the system dynamic and flexible. A thousand small businesses try more solutions than four giant businesses and are more likely to find the best ones. And, best, if one fails, then nothing vital is lost. The economy is built on a thousand small foundations, so the loss of one makes no difference.
In large systems like Wal-Mart or the federal government, the decision-makers are so removed from the individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy that the individuals become abstractions. This allows for decisions that devastate communities but pad the profit margin.
There is one flaw, though. An economy built on many small actors creates stability at the expense of exponential growth. But then, that doesn't sound so bad to me.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
The Left Makes You Crazy
This article got a well-deserved beating in the light-cultural press this week.
For those of more sober interests, I'll summarize: Writer Jen Caron was at her yoga class when a "young, fairly heavy black woman" joined, taking a place right behind Caron. The newcomer was immediately overwhelmed by the experience, and stopped participating. She spent the class " crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable," as Caron reports it.
Caron had many occasions to face the woman directly. " Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body."
The following is notable:
The article is silly. Jen Caron is silly. The presence of a black woman immediately shocks her into racial awareness. What's the difference between a "racist" seeing a black woman and assuming that she's there to go through the students' purses and a SWPL thinking she's victimized by all the skinny white bodies? The left doesn't want you to stop stereotyping other groups; they just want you to stereotype them the left's way.
Most criticism of the article has been relatively sensible. "What's wrong with this woman?," is the gist. Flavorwire's Michelle Dean (who we last saw becoming exhausted at magazine cover controversies) is more damning:
It hasn't surfaced enough here, but one of my pet peeves these days is that the only criticism we are allowed to make has to be from the left. Caron makes an ass of herself by climbing on the cross for her white guilt. Dean thinks that she didn't use enough nails.
But the real issue in the original piece is not that Caron interpreted her situation in a judgmental manner or that she gave herself a nervous breakdown contemplating the intersectionality of it or even that she felt it was necessary to tell the world about her experience. It's that she did nothing.
Now, she had no obligation to do anything. But she seems to have felt so strongly about it that it's pathetic she simply "thought about what the instructor could or should have done to help her."
That's the left, folks: If you see someone suffering, you should complain because someone else--preferably an authority--didn't help them.
Utopia's right around the corner!
For those of more sober interests, I'll summarize: Writer Jen Caron was at her yoga class when a "young, fairly heavy black woman" joined, taking a place right behind Caron. The newcomer was immediately overwhelmed by the experience, and stopped participating. She spent the class " crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable," as Caron reports it.
Caron had many occasions to face the woman directly. " Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body."
I realized with horror that despite the all-inclusivity preached by the studio, despite the purported blindness to socioeconomic status, despite the sizeable population of regular Asian students, black students were few and far between.Caron wondered if she shouldn't, you know, say something to make the woman feel more comfortable, but opted instead to go home, where she "promptly broke down crying."
The following is notable:
Knowing fully well that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.Then:
The question is, of course, so much bigger than yoga—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we practice yoga in good conscience, when mere mindfulness is not enough? How do we create a space that is accessible not just to everybody, but to every body?That's where leftism puts you. You talk yourself into trauma. You recognize your trauma is meaningless. You blame an abstract system. You congratulate yourself for being unsatisfied with the system. You are paralyzed and you do it to yourself.
The article is silly. Jen Caron is silly. The presence of a black woman immediately shocks her into racial awareness. What's the difference between a "racist" seeing a black woman and assuming that she's there to go through the students' purses and a SWPL thinking she's victimized by all the skinny white bodies? The left doesn't want you to stop stereotyping other groups; they just want you to stereotype them the left's way.
Most criticism of the article has been relatively sensible. "What's wrong with this woman?," is the gist. Flavorwire's Michelle Dean (who we last saw becoming exhausted at magazine cover controversies) is more damning:
But at every yoga class I’ve ever attended — and I go to few these days — I have noticed a few Jen Carons eyeing the circumference of others’ thighs like it’s their job. Women are trained from birth to judge and scrutinize each others’ bodies in a particular way; there is no reason to believe that gets left at the door because of light-Buddhist blather about suffering and impermanence and a few “no judgment” posters on the wall.Caron comes off as a foolish narcissist, but not as a sizist--and definitely nothing like how Dean has characterized her here. But, of course, it's not Caron's fault--she was "trained from birth" to eyeball other women's bodies.
There’s no reason to believe a lifetime of subtle training to characterize black people as “others” full of “hostility” will be left at the door, either, no matter how many meditation classes one takes. Racism just has a better foothold in the culture than the sort of light New-Agey-qua-Buddhist philosophy that is unevenly applied in yoga classes.Yes, you read correctly: Caron's hysterical response to the racism she believes is inherent in the yoga system is the result of Caron's racism. Boy, you just can't win for losing, huh?
It hasn't surfaced enough here, but one of my pet peeves these days is that the only criticism we are allowed to make has to be from the left. Caron makes an ass of herself by climbing on the cross for her white guilt. Dean thinks that she didn't use enough nails.
But the real issue in the original piece is not that Caron interpreted her situation in a judgmental manner or that she gave herself a nervous breakdown contemplating the intersectionality of it or even that she felt it was necessary to tell the world about her experience. It's that she did nothing.
Now, she had no obligation to do anything. But she seems to have felt so strongly about it that it's pathetic she simply "thought about what the instructor could or should have done to help her."
That's the left, folks: If you see someone suffering, you should complain because someone else--preferably an authority--didn't help them.
Utopia's right around the corner!
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Darkly Enlightened, Not Neoreactionary
I have to confess: as exciting as all this neoreactionary talk has been, I'm starting to get tired of it.
It's not that I don't agree with the writers in the circle--I do, most of the time. I'm just losing interest in the self-reference and especially the drive toward a philosophical/political theory.
From now on, I'll think I'll go with the name Dark Enlightenment. The name's a bit goofy but it at least places us at the source of the conflict--the erroneous assumptions that arose during the Enlightenment and have driven the Western world ever since. I prefer the Counter Enlightenment but one never gets a say in these things.
My impression upon finding the movement was the same spark of recognition that most of us had. We'd lived in the modern world, having been educated but also educating ourselves, and found that modernity is increasingly absurd. It's absurd because its assumptions are founded on will, not on reality. We know enough history to realize that the past had very different assumptions, ones that prevented many of the problems we have today.
Where a leftist would flagellate himself and beg for understanding, we thought, Maybe it's not me that's wrong. We found our little spots on the web that engaged us, challenged and affirmed our ideas, and eventually a vague consensus was formed and the community has coalesced.
That's what I consider the Dark Enlightenment, a loose coalition of people who understand that the world is not the way the enlightened tell us it is. Now that "Neoreaction" has emerged, it strikes me as rather...progressive.
The core error of the political/philosophical Enlightenment is not the conception of human rights or the misunderstanding of freedom, it's that humans can be organized rationally. The assumption is the same whether it's parliamentary democracy or Soviet communism.
The error comes from not understanding this: humans are non-rational and, well, sinful. Reason is a tool of the human mind, our special gift, but capable of misuse. The Red-pillers know this; they call it hamstering. Humans can decide what they want, non-rationally, and then rationalize their desires, creating the impression that whatever they want is good, logical and the only sane decision to make. This is why prudence is the highest virtue man can achieve on his own--using right(eous) reason.
There is no point in designing a system--every system is doomed to failure, given enough time. Our laws and our desires are always in conflict, so it's only a matter of time before the right people with wrong intentions find a way to make their agendas legal.
The drive to create some kind of political theory comes mainly from the youngest writers, the guys who are translating the conversation into an impenetrable brick wall of philosophical terms. They seem to think that if they stack enough abstractions together, they'll discover they've built an entirely new theory.
The second force behind neoreaction-as-ideology is the older writers who like to fantasize about the New Order that will come after liberal democracy fails. A pleasant enough diversion but do you really think civilization will stop and look at your blueprints?
Neoreaction, as a product of the Dark Enlightenment, works better as a descriptive mechanism and should avoid being prescriptive. Trying to set down a rational set of rules for a new society undermines all the insights neoreaction provided. We already had a Karl Marx and it didn't work out.
Like everyone in the conversation, I read Moldbug. His most important contribution is naming the demon. He called the back-scratching relationship between academia, the media and the bureaucracy "The Cathedral," and suddenly we all recognized its shape, like the blind men who each felt a different part of the elephant. He pointed out that liberalism is a faith, and one derived from "enlightened" versions of Christianity, eventually so enlightened that Christ was removed.
His prescription for the ills of humanity, to be blunt, is horseshit. Tech-heavy science fiction conflating business corporations and absolute monarchy. When he got to the point where state weapons are controlled by microchips in order to prevent coup de etats, I was wondering when The Prophesied One would enter the story.
Moldbug is better-read than I am and has made it his goal to be skillful in winning arguments. I'd probably end up silent if we debated. But, for all his intelligence and insight, his belief that a better society can be designed on paper is high hubris.
I'll avoid being prescriptive myself, so I'll predict instead. What I think will emerge from neoreaction, assuming that it stops navel-gazing and preening, is a precise critique of the assumptions that have led Western Civilization down the primrose path.
Large-scale democracy is inherently degenerative. People will never be equal in their abilities, temperaments or ambitions. Bureaucracy holds permanent power in government. The state can influence society but not control it. Culture matters. Ethnicity matters. Morality matters.
There's more, of course, that we will work out as we trade ideas. But, in fixing these post-Enlightenment errors, we must be thinking of the future. Not to triangulate the best way to put geniuses on a throne, but to avoid these errors because they are seductive.
The assumptions that come from the Enlightenment are those of moral and intellectual superiority. They are sweet-sounding words that foster evil. They profess unity but create division. They are virulent.
If neoreaction is to come to any positive end, it will be in creating a vaccine against the virus. We'll need it for whatever comes next.
It's not that I don't agree with the writers in the circle--I do, most of the time. I'm just losing interest in the self-reference and especially the drive toward a philosophical/political theory.
From now on, I'll think I'll go with the name Dark Enlightenment. The name's a bit goofy but it at least places us at the source of the conflict--the erroneous assumptions that arose during the Enlightenment and have driven the Western world ever since. I prefer the Counter Enlightenment but one never gets a say in these things.
My impression upon finding the movement was the same spark of recognition that most of us had. We'd lived in the modern world, having been educated but also educating ourselves, and found that modernity is increasingly absurd. It's absurd because its assumptions are founded on will, not on reality. We know enough history to realize that the past had very different assumptions, ones that prevented many of the problems we have today.
Where a leftist would flagellate himself and beg for understanding, we thought, Maybe it's not me that's wrong. We found our little spots on the web that engaged us, challenged and affirmed our ideas, and eventually a vague consensus was formed and the community has coalesced.
That's what I consider the Dark Enlightenment, a loose coalition of people who understand that the world is not the way the enlightened tell us it is. Now that "Neoreaction" has emerged, it strikes me as rather...progressive.
The core error of the political/philosophical Enlightenment is not the conception of human rights or the misunderstanding of freedom, it's that humans can be organized rationally. The assumption is the same whether it's parliamentary democracy or Soviet communism.
The error comes from not understanding this: humans are non-rational and, well, sinful. Reason is a tool of the human mind, our special gift, but capable of misuse. The Red-pillers know this; they call it hamstering. Humans can decide what they want, non-rationally, and then rationalize their desires, creating the impression that whatever they want is good, logical and the only sane decision to make. This is why prudence is the highest virtue man can achieve on his own--using right(eous) reason.
There is no point in designing a system--every system is doomed to failure, given enough time. Our laws and our desires are always in conflict, so it's only a matter of time before the right people with wrong intentions find a way to make their agendas legal.
The drive to create some kind of political theory comes mainly from the youngest writers, the guys who are translating the conversation into an impenetrable brick wall of philosophical terms. They seem to think that if they stack enough abstractions together, they'll discover they've built an entirely new theory.
The second force behind neoreaction-as-ideology is the older writers who like to fantasize about the New Order that will come after liberal democracy fails. A pleasant enough diversion but do you really think civilization will stop and look at your blueprints?
Neoreaction, as a product of the Dark Enlightenment, works better as a descriptive mechanism and should avoid being prescriptive. Trying to set down a rational set of rules for a new society undermines all the insights neoreaction provided. We already had a Karl Marx and it didn't work out.
Like everyone in the conversation, I read Moldbug. His most important contribution is naming the demon. He called the back-scratching relationship between academia, the media and the bureaucracy "The Cathedral," and suddenly we all recognized its shape, like the blind men who each felt a different part of the elephant. He pointed out that liberalism is a faith, and one derived from "enlightened" versions of Christianity, eventually so enlightened that Christ was removed.
His prescription for the ills of humanity, to be blunt, is horseshit. Tech-heavy science fiction conflating business corporations and absolute monarchy. When he got to the point where state weapons are controlled by microchips in order to prevent coup de etats, I was wondering when The Prophesied One would enter the story.
Moldbug is better-read than I am and has made it his goal to be skillful in winning arguments. I'd probably end up silent if we debated. But, for all his intelligence and insight, his belief that a better society can be designed on paper is high hubris.
I'll avoid being prescriptive myself, so I'll predict instead. What I think will emerge from neoreaction, assuming that it stops navel-gazing and preening, is a precise critique of the assumptions that have led Western Civilization down the primrose path.
Large-scale democracy is inherently degenerative. People will never be equal in their abilities, temperaments or ambitions. Bureaucracy holds permanent power in government. The state can influence society but not control it. Culture matters. Ethnicity matters. Morality matters.
There's more, of course, that we will work out as we trade ideas. But, in fixing these post-Enlightenment errors, we must be thinking of the future. Not to triangulate the best way to put geniuses on a throne, but to avoid these errors because they are seductive.
The assumptions that come from the Enlightenment are those of moral and intellectual superiority. They are sweet-sounding words that foster evil. They profess unity but create division. They are virulent.
If neoreaction is to come to any positive end, it will be in creating a vaccine against the virus. We'll need it for whatever comes next.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
How the Roosevelts Brought Wal-Mart to Your Town
Back when Obama was still the apple of progressive eyes, I talked to a guy who couldn't be more thrilled that the president was going after "Big Auto."
I was still libertarian back then but I was already thinking about unchecked economic power. I envisioned a wrestling ring, Royal Rumble style, with giants trying to toss one another out of the ring. Big Auto, Big Pharma, Big Insurance. I tried to explain to the guy that he was rooting for Big Government.
Big Government was the favorite to win, with or without fans. He had the power to set the rules as he went along. He had the monopoly on violence. He had the deepest pockets.
I argued that it was better to have the giants struggling with each other. At least they were more likely to start dominating us little guys. If Big Government won supreme over all, then there's no limit to what he might do with that power.
The guy nodded and we dropped the subject. The vision stayed with me and started me down the road I'm following now.
Power tends to centralize as minor power-holders coalesce around greater power-holders. Power corrupts. If Big Government stands in the ring alone, the only check against tyranny is the goodness of his heart.
If the power centers are large and few, then there are two options. The powers can either work to eliminate the others or they can form an alliance. For the former, think of the left's long-standing siege of Christianity, which it tars as either sadly backwards or downright immoral. For the latter, think of cronyism.
I was a reluctant libertarian because I didn't see any check against greed. If an business gets big enough it can start altering the playing field to favor itself. A hypothetical: If the minimum wage increases, it will cost Wal-Mart, say, $100 million. If they lobby enough to stop the increase, it will cost them $99 million. Which do you think they'll choose?
Some might say that's libertarianism corrupted. I think it's inevitable. If the business can change the rules for its own benefit, it will. It's only good business. But is it good?
There are a whole host of problems that stem from this centralization of money and power. It seems to that it's best to keep power centers a great deal smaller than they are now.
With that in mind, I often think about the action against monopolies taken at the end of the Gilded Age. Preventing monopolies just results in oligopolies, a handful of companies that have the option of destroying one another or working together to extract maximum profits. Wouldn't it have been better to break them down even further, limiting their operations by industry and geography?
So I was excited to learn about a proposal for just that, from Zen Pundit. (Unfortunately, the link is currently held hostage due to exceeded bandwidth.)
Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson were all running for president in 1912 and each had a proposal for dealing with the new economic centers of power in the US.
The article goes on to show how Franklin Roosevelt developed his cousin's proposal by using government-created and -supported centers of power. Unions and ethnic voting blocs would hold powerful economic actors in check, with the coup de grace being the bloc created by implementing Social Security. (The thinking behind this strikes me as similar to how dictators create their own separate armies to counter the established military.)
Typical leftist stuff, dividing by creating a win/loss game, but FDR at least knew something that our current rulers have forgotten: If the people are happy, then no one cares who's in charge. The structure that FDR put in place helped to launch the US as the premier economic superpower after WWII (the destruction of Europe helped a little, too).
What I find most interesting is this:
After all, the kings who declared their divine right to rule eventually descended to the exquisitely-educated dolts who lost or gave up all their power. The old money WASPs who planned to steer America with wisdom eventually gave up their roles to prevent looking overweening or racist.
So now we have these big concentrations of power, "too big to fail," swapping employees with the agencies that are supposed to regulate them. Power always eventually falls into the hands of those that are better at getting power than having power.
So why not make sure that every power is small? The answer should be obvious: if a large economic power develops, then federal power will have to grow even larger to keep it in check.
The dangers of a centralized system are too numerous to list here but we're living the end stages of them. The powers that be expect that every problem can be solved by federal diktat. When their solutions fail, they double down or propose yet another layer of regulation and bureaucracy.
But, had Wilson's proposal been enacted, we wouldn't have enormous corporations on whose vitality the entire nation depends. The failure of a bank wouldn't send the economic world into convulsions. Big chains couldn't run old robber-baron scams and eliminate their competition. Our national conversation wouldn't be dominated by a handful of media companies.
Our society would be more stable and more flexible. Without the ability to dominate completely, competition keeps us sharp. When we can't command a force of a million employees, we can't avoid the human costs of our decisions.
Which is why I more or less identify as a distributist.
I was still libertarian back then but I was already thinking about unchecked economic power. I envisioned a wrestling ring, Royal Rumble style, with giants trying to toss one another out of the ring. Big Auto, Big Pharma, Big Insurance. I tried to explain to the guy that he was rooting for Big Government.
Big Government was the favorite to win, with or without fans. He had the power to set the rules as he went along. He had the monopoly on violence. He had the deepest pockets.
I argued that it was better to have the giants struggling with each other. At least they were more likely to start dominating us little guys. If Big Government won supreme over all, then there's no limit to what he might do with that power.
The guy nodded and we dropped the subject. The vision stayed with me and started me down the road I'm following now.
Power tends to centralize as minor power-holders coalesce around greater power-holders. Power corrupts. If Big Government stands in the ring alone, the only check against tyranny is the goodness of his heart.
If the power centers are large and few, then there are two options. The powers can either work to eliminate the others or they can form an alliance. For the former, think of the left's long-standing siege of Christianity, which it tars as either sadly backwards or downright immoral. For the latter, think of cronyism.
I was a reluctant libertarian because I didn't see any check against greed. If an business gets big enough it can start altering the playing field to favor itself. A hypothetical: If the minimum wage increases, it will cost Wal-Mart, say, $100 million. If they lobby enough to stop the increase, it will cost them $99 million. Which do you think they'll choose?
Some might say that's libertarianism corrupted. I think it's inevitable. If the business can change the rules for its own benefit, it will. It's only good business. But is it good?
There are a whole host of problems that stem from this centralization of money and power. It seems to that it's best to keep power centers a great deal smaller than they are now.
With that in mind, I often think about the action against monopolies taken at the end of the Gilded Age. Preventing monopolies just results in oligopolies, a handful of companies that have the option of destroying one another or working together to extract maximum profits. Wouldn't it have been better to break them down even further, limiting their operations by industry and geography?
So I was excited to learn about a proposal for just that, from Zen Pundit. (Unfortunately, the link is currently held hostage due to exceeded bandwidth.)
Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson were all running for president in 1912 and each had a proposal for dealing with the new economic centers of power in the US.
[Taft] sought to contain large economic concentrations by using the Federal government to selectively break them down into smaller pieces and regulating them around the edges by controlling their interactions with each other.In other words, smack 'em down if they got too big and uppity.
[Roosevelt] sought to build the United States federal government into an over-awing Leviathan that could cow large concentrations of wealth by subjecting them to tight scrutiny and regulation.In short, creating federal regulatory agencies. If this sound familiar, it's what we have today. But Wilson's proposal would have made a much different, much more stable America:
Woodrow Wilson proposed breaking up large concentrations of wealth into so many tiny pieces that each tiny piece could be overawed by just one of the forty-six little leviathans of the several states of the Union.Looking back, Wilson seems like exactly the wrong sort of man for the presidency. How many other men seemed so puritanical about his convictions and were seduced so completely by power? The article doesn't give Wilson's justifications, but he more or less enacted Roosevelt's proposal. Perhaps we shouldn't blame Wilson too much; technocracy was in the air and the federal bureaucracy was on the rise.
The article goes on to show how Franklin Roosevelt developed his cousin's proposal by using government-created and -supported centers of power. Unions and ethnic voting blocs would hold powerful economic actors in check, with the coup de grace being the bloc created by implementing Social Security. (The thinking behind this strikes me as similar to how dictators create their own separate armies to counter the established military.)
Typical leftist stuff, dividing by creating a win/loss game, but FDR at least knew something that our current rulers have forgotten: If the people are happy, then no one cares who's in charge. The structure that FDR put in place helped to launch the US as the premier economic superpower after WWII (the destruction of Europe helped a little, too).
What I find most interesting is this:
FDR also carried forth cousin Theodore’s belief that these competing power blocs would be overseen by enlightened regulators with the discretionary flexibility to intervene in their internal affairs and their interrelationships from time to time as dictated by the latest principles of scientific management. These regulators would be freed from the taint of crony capitalist corruption because, since FDR, like Theodore, assumed that these regulators would be Old Money like themselves, too wealthy and too imbued with noblesse oblige to be bought by grubby capital.I'm a student of the Dark Enlightenment, but it seems to me that even they don't think about the natural decay of the system. Monarchy, aristocracy, authoritarianism, democracy--they all depend on the rulers having some quality that will prevent the failure of the system. But human nature dictates that every system will be gamed, no matter how well it's set up.
After all, the kings who declared their divine right to rule eventually descended to the exquisitely-educated dolts who lost or gave up all their power. The old money WASPs who planned to steer America with wisdom eventually gave up their roles to prevent looking overweening or racist.
So now we have these big concentrations of power, "too big to fail," swapping employees with the agencies that are supposed to regulate them. Power always eventually falls into the hands of those that are better at getting power than having power.
So why not make sure that every power is small? The answer should be obvious: if a large economic power develops, then federal power will have to grow even larger to keep it in check.
The dangers of a centralized system are too numerous to list here but we're living the end stages of them. The powers that be expect that every problem can be solved by federal diktat. When their solutions fail, they double down or propose yet another layer of regulation and bureaucracy.
But, had Wilson's proposal been enacted, we wouldn't have enormous corporations on whose vitality the entire nation depends. The failure of a bank wouldn't send the economic world into convulsions. Big chains couldn't run old robber-baron scams and eliminate their competition. Our national conversation wouldn't be dominated by a handful of media companies.
Our society would be more stable and more flexible. Without the ability to dominate completely, competition keeps us sharp. When we can't command a force of a million employees, we can't avoid the human costs of our decisions.
Which is why I more or less identify as a distributist.
The Self-Hating Bourgeoisie
Patton Oswalt had a minor kerfluffle on Twitter late last week when he quoted Steve Sailer's, "Political correctness is a war on noticing." Twitter social justice warriors who follow Oswalt know that Sailer is a verboten writer and hoped to shame Oswalt by pointing this out.
I was surprised even to see the quote. Oswalt has always struck me as the leading comedian who is brave enough to say that others are racists. You know, real "speaking truth to power" stuff. But a few of Sailer's commenters reminded me that Oswalt has a relationship with Jim Goad, even if they are often at loggerheads.
I like to beat up on stand-up comics because their job requires them to stand, all alone, with a microphone and reveal their assumptions--but mainly because it's an entertainment form I used to love. I hate seeing it radicalized. I've never stopped paying attention to Oswalt even as his material got closer to the New Atheist attitude: "Religious people are dumb. I'm smart. We're smart, right, folks?"
But Oswalt isn't dumb as much as he's typical of the enlightened left: he's a self-hating bourgeoisie.
Another comment on Sailer's post pointed out that Oswalt's from a middle-class (if not higher) suburb in Virginia. His hometown figured in some of his earlier work. It's easy to imagine him cultivating his misery back in high school, surrounded by people who weren't as smart as he is.
I think a lot of the Kool-Aid-drinking progressives are this way. They grew up surrounded by people of the same class who they hated.
But here's the thing: That disgust is usually aesthetic--merely a matter of passions. Oswalt's a little older than I am and is a devotee of comic books and science fiction. Back then, being a "nerd" wasn't cool so he probably got a lot of grief.
People like Oswalt and, for a time, myself, outgrew Knight Rider and discovered David Lynch and John Waters. We discovered David Bowie and the Dead Kennedys. We saw a whole new groovy world outside of our middle-class neighborhoods, a world that offered a lot more of everything we were excited about. Everyone around us was now hopelessly square and so we rejected everything about them.
One of the reasons I didn't abandon Oswalt is a bit called "The World's Most Amazing Father." In it, he says that he's going to be the most boring, conformist father he can be in order to make sure his kids will rebel and be cool. What I liked is his description of "cool" parents and what an uncertain, unstable life they create for their kids. He's not blind; thus his appreciation for Sailer's quote.
Once I escaped my small town, I couldn't help noticing a lot myself. I was in search of people who thought like me, who were looking for alternatives to traditional life.
I found the artsy, cool kids and eventually became disgusted. They weren't exploring a modern lifestyle--they were simply indulging themselves and behaving as if they were enlightened. They bounced from minor disaster to minor disaster (and there was always someone in the wider circle experiencing a major disaster). They were more people who had taught themselves sociopathy than people who had outgrown their middle-class values.
By contrast, the firmly middle-class kids I knew did drugs and screwed around as much as the hipsters but at least they had the feeling that all that fun wasn't making them all that happy. They always pictured themselves giving it all up someday and settling down. They were thinking about what they were doing.
I was surprised even to see the quote. Oswalt has always struck me as the leading comedian who is brave enough to say that others are racists. You know, real "speaking truth to power" stuff. But a few of Sailer's commenters reminded me that Oswalt has a relationship with Jim Goad, even if they are often at loggerheads.
I like to beat up on stand-up comics because their job requires them to stand, all alone, with a microphone and reveal their assumptions--but mainly because it's an entertainment form I used to love. I hate seeing it radicalized. I've never stopped paying attention to Oswalt even as his material got closer to the New Atheist attitude: "Religious people are dumb. I'm smart. We're smart, right, folks?"
But Oswalt isn't dumb as much as he's typical of the enlightened left: he's a self-hating bourgeoisie.
Another comment on Sailer's post pointed out that Oswalt's from a middle-class (if not higher) suburb in Virginia. His hometown figured in some of his earlier work. It's easy to imagine him cultivating his misery back in high school, surrounded by people who weren't as smart as he is.
I think a lot of the Kool-Aid-drinking progressives are this way. They grew up surrounded by people of the same class who they hated.
But here's the thing: That disgust is usually aesthetic--merely a matter of passions. Oswalt's a little older than I am and is a devotee of comic books and science fiction. Back then, being a "nerd" wasn't cool so he probably got a lot of grief.
People like Oswalt and, for a time, myself, outgrew Knight Rider and discovered David Lynch and John Waters. We discovered David Bowie and the Dead Kennedys. We saw a whole new groovy world outside of our middle-class neighborhoods, a world that offered a lot more of everything we were excited about. Everyone around us was now hopelessly square and so we rejected everything about them.
One of the reasons I didn't abandon Oswalt is a bit called "The World's Most Amazing Father." In it, he says that he's going to be the most boring, conformist father he can be in order to make sure his kids will rebel and be cool. What I liked is his description of "cool" parents and what an uncertain, unstable life they create for their kids. He's not blind; thus his appreciation for Sailer's quote.
Once I escaped my small town, I couldn't help noticing a lot myself. I was in search of people who thought like me, who were looking for alternatives to traditional life.
I found the artsy, cool kids and eventually became disgusted. They weren't exploring a modern lifestyle--they were simply indulging themselves and behaving as if they were enlightened. They bounced from minor disaster to minor disaster (and there was always someone in the wider circle experiencing a major disaster). They were more people who had taught themselves sociopathy than people who had outgrown their middle-class values.
By contrast, the firmly middle-class kids I knew did drugs and screwed around as much as the hipsters but at least they had the feeling that all that fun wasn't making them all that happy. They always pictured themselves giving it all up someday and settling down. They were thinking about what they were doing.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Tickles of Outrage Fatigue
Flavorwire had a nice run for a while. They focused on listicles, but listicles that came from a level of sophistication not found on your Buzzfeeds or Upworthys. The staff seemed to be a collection of n-nerds--the music lists by music nerds, the book lists by book nerds, etc--which meant that they explored the Expanded Modern Canon. They were as likely to discuss Iggy Pop as Arcade Fire, Virginia Woolf as much as David Foster Wallace. Though their choices weren't usually surprising, it was nice to read pieces by people who were aware of media made before they were born.
But we're in the second generation of professional web content. The original writers have moved on to other jobs--probably editorial--and their replacements are excellent examples of where our current culture has taken us: myopic and unthinkingly leftist, with a desire to be considered intelligent and insightful.
They are myopic in that their media interests are broader but lack the depth of knowledge that their predecessors had. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of what's being produced right now without much thought to how that fits into the history of the medium. A typically youthful perspective, forgivable but which makes their content a lot less interesting than it used to be.
More irritating is the pretensions to intelligence that stems from swallowing the left's blue pill. You can find this all over mainstream critical websites, the idea that deconstructing works from the perspective of identity politics is the height of criticism. I've mentioned before the essay attacking the New York Times for not using a trans subject's preferred (made up) pronouns. That Flavorwire offers bandwidth to this idea shows how little thinking is required to appear to be a cultural critic; no thought is given to how many different pronouns are being created and how this will affect basic readability. Only onwards and upwards towards today's version of the progressive utopia.
But articles like this give me a little bit of hope. Flavorwire's not going to turn around, of course, and the social justice warriors aren't on the verge of beating their keyboards into plowshares, but any public mention of outrage fatigue should be encouraged.
The issue at hand is typically petty. ELLE Magazine, which isn't exactly the most influential periodical on the block, has published its latest issue with four variant covers. All of these covers feature a grrl-power zeitgeist role model: Amy Poehler, Zoey Deschaanel and some gal from Girls. They are featured in full-torso shots, full color. The fourth is Mindy Kaling, whose portrait is in black and white and from the bust up. Kaling is of Indian heritage and has an average-to-dumpy figure--picture Lena Dunham if she got on the elliptical four times a week without cutting any calories.
The outrage has centered around the hottest SJW issue of the day, sizism, rather than that the only non-white's portrait is aesthetically different from all the others.
Sizism over racism makes sense. The SJW movement is primarily driven by feminism. Feminism likes to pretend that it's a warm, nurturing movement that values everyone's struggles and perspectives but its loudest outcries are always the irritations of the white, middle-class women at the center. Sailer's Law of Female Journalism applies, as does Amos & Gromar's second: as the current generation of feminist blog writers hit the Wall, they imagine that their own personal issues are now News Everyone Should Consider.
Hitting the Wall, for most women, means more than crow's feet and short hair; it means gaining weight. Thus, the front line of the War on Women is society's rejection of heavier women. By cropping Kaling's body from the photo, ELLE is telling the world that small-breasted, wide-hipped women who carry a few extra pounds aren't as beautiful as conventionally attractive women. Which most men will tell you without consulting fashion magazine covers.
In considering this, Flavorwire writer Michelle Dean is suddenly very tired: "I confess I am growing weary of magazine-cover controversies like these," she says, first because she's empathizes with Kaling having to address an argument that says, "They're discriminating against you because you're fat." With friends like these, you know.
Dean also applies a little real-world knowledge of the editorial process, pointing out that the ELLE editors probably considered some photos that matched the aesthetics of the others and found them less "flattering." This is probably true; the mass-market fashion industry is always teetering between walking on eggshells around their consumers and mean-girl dominance. They'd like to avoid accusations of being anti-woman but they are also authorities--sometimes you have to say, "Deal with it, bitches. This is gorgeous."
Dean ultimately runs up against the ultimate enemy of the left: reality.
Outrage enthusiasts should note the three adjectives ELLE uses, sexy, beautiful and chic. These are aspirational qualities, not affirmative. What the SJW brigade never acknowledges is that nearly all pop culture is this way. Gritty realism doesn't sell because, if people wanted to see overweight women, they could just go to McDonalds.
Leftism is virulent, though. Faced with immutable human nature, the next option is to blame people, all of them:
I've written about it before (perhaps less than clearly): the left is manipulates the public through semantic associations that fit humanity's need for stories.
How much racist rhetoric have you actually heard from the Tea Party? None from any official voice and almost none from any identified member. Yet your average center-leftists understand the group as undeniably racist--the two terms are almost interchangeable in most mainstream commentary.
If the Tea Party is a crypto-racist movement, then the Tea Party is no different from the perennial bogeymen of the left, only with a new name. The Fight Against Racism is a narrative already accepted far and wide. We fight racists. The Tea Party fights us. Ergo, the Tea Party is racist. Since we fight racism, we must defeat the Tea Party.
This is propaganda work. What we see in the ELLE controverslette is the pitfall of living in a propagandistic world: believing that the representations are the reality. ELLE traffics in aspiration; its images are what women want to be. So the true believer fights over the images, not the aspirations. If the magazine would only put a fat woman on the cover, then women will want to be fat and women who are already fat will be considered sexy, beautiful and chic. Their self-esteem will skyrocket and suddenly they'll be good at math and science and business and politics and take over the world!
Dean is catching a glimpse behind the illusion. The People want thin, beautiful women on their fashion magazine covers. ELLE is giving them what they want. Like a good Soviet, though, she reckons that we should leave ELLE alone and change The People.
However, speaking semantically, when I hear reeducation, I think Pol Pot.
But we're in the second generation of professional web content. The original writers have moved on to other jobs--probably editorial--and their replacements are excellent examples of where our current culture has taken us: myopic and unthinkingly leftist, with a desire to be considered intelligent and insightful.
They are myopic in that their media interests are broader but lack the depth of knowledge that their predecessors had. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of what's being produced right now without much thought to how that fits into the history of the medium. A typically youthful perspective, forgivable but which makes their content a lot less interesting than it used to be.
More irritating is the pretensions to intelligence that stems from swallowing the left's blue pill. You can find this all over mainstream critical websites, the idea that deconstructing works from the perspective of identity politics is the height of criticism. I've mentioned before the essay attacking the New York Times for not using a trans subject's preferred (made up) pronouns. That Flavorwire offers bandwidth to this idea shows how little thinking is required to appear to be a cultural critic; no thought is given to how many different pronouns are being created and how this will affect basic readability. Only onwards and upwards towards today's version of the progressive utopia.
But articles like this give me a little bit of hope. Flavorwire's not going to turn around, of course, and the social justice warriors aren't on the verge of beating their keyboards into plowshares, but any public mention of outrage fatigue should be encouraged.
The issue at hand is typically petty. ELLE Magazine, which isn't exactly the most influential periodical on the block, has published its latest issue with four variant covers. All of these covers feature a grrl-power zeitgeist role model: Amy Poehler, Zoey Deschaanel and some gal from Girls. They are featured in full-torso shots, full color. The fourth is Mindy Kaling, whose portrait is in black and white and from the bust up. Kaling is of Indian heritage and has an average-to-dumpy figure--picture Lena Dunham if she got on the elliptical four times a week without cutting any calories.
The outrage has centered around the hottest SJW issue of the day, sizism, rather than that the only non-white's portrait is aesthetically different from all the others.
Sizism over racism makes sense. The SJW movement is primarily driven by feminism. Feminism likes to pretend that it's a warm, nurturing movement that values everyone's struggles and perspectives but its loudest outcries are always the irritations of the white, middle-class women at the center. Sailer's Law of Female Journalism applies, as does Amos & Gromar's second: as the current generation of feminist blog writers hit the Wall, they imagine that their own personal issues are now News Everyone Should Consider.
Hitting the Wall, for most women, means more than crow's feet and short hair; it means gaining weight. Thus, the front line of the War on Women is society's rejection of heavier women. By cropping Kaling's body from the photo, ELLE is telling the world that small-breasted, wide-hipped women who carry a few extra pounds aren't as beautiful as conventionally attractive women. Which most men will tell you without consulting fashion magazine covers.
In considering this, Flavorwire writer Michelle Dean is suddenly very tired: "I confess I am growing weary of magazine-cover controversies like these," she says, first because she's empathizes with Kaling having to address an argument that says, "They're discriminating against you because you're fat." With friends like these, you know.
Dean also applies a little real-world knowledge of the editorial process, pointing out that the ELLE editors probably considered some photos that matched the aesthetics of the others and found them less "flattering." This is probably true; the mass-market fashion industry is always teetering between walking on eggshells around their consumers and mean-girl dominance. They'd like to avoid accusations of being anti-woman but they are also authorities--sometimes you have to say, "Deal with it, bitches. This is gorgeous."
Dean ultimately runs up against the ultimate enemy of the left: reality.
Mostly, I think, I feel weary because it is my perception that fashion magazines are just never going to catch up on this issue. They don’t care to catch up on this issue. Our attempt to hold them “accountable” for the choices they make, magazine cover-wise, has been ongoing for several years now. It has made almost no difference. Celebrities are still routinely photoshopped into unrecognizability, the models are still what they are, and so ELLE, confronted with this new round of complaining, simply responds, “Mindy looks sexy, beautiful and chic. We think it is a striking and sophisticated cover and are thrilled to celebrate her in our Women in TV Issue.”As much as they may like to support progressive ideals, ELLE Magazine has to make money, which makes their choices quantifiable. A progressive choice loses money, so they rationalize the profitable choice into the best justification at hand, that they're empowering Kaling herself, if not the whole XL set.
Outrage enthusiasts should note the three adjectives ELLE uses, sexy, beautiful and chic. These are aspirational qualities, not affirmative. What the SJW brigade never acknowledges is that nearly all pop culture is this way. Gritty realism doesn't sell because, if people wanted to see overweight women, they could just go to McDonalds.
Leftism is virulent, though. Faced with immutable human nature, the next option is to blame people, all of them:
What I find frankly worse is that there isn’t, in my perception, any real desire for change among the people who consume fashion magazines. I’m talking of the general populace here, rather than fashion bloggers. They like the pretty pictures; they don’t worry too much about how inaccessible — not just body-shape-wise, or in the lily-whiteness of the fashion world overall, but financially too — all of this stuff is. They are producing expensive catalogs, fantasy documents, and people aren’t really that interested in revising their fantasies.Put two and two together, and Dean is saying that the general populace (which needs more, more, more democracy, BTW) needs to make their fantasies more realistic. They should also make their white more black and their cats more doggish.
I've written about it before (perhaps less than clearly): the left is manipulates the public through semantic associations that fit humanity's need for stories.
How much racist rhetoric have you actually heard from the Tea Party? None from any official voice and almost none from any identified member. Yet your average center-leftists understand the group as undeniably racist--the two terms are almost interchangeable in most mainstream commentary.
If the Tea Party is a crypto-racist movement, then the Tea Party is no different from the perennial bogeymen of the left, only with a new name. The Fight Against Racism is a narrative already accepted far and wide. We fight racists. The Tea Party fights us. Ergo, the Tea Party is racist. Since we fight racism, we must defeat the Tea Party.
This is propaganda work. What we see in the ELLE controverslette is the pitfall of living in a propagandistic world: believing that the representations are the reality. ELLE traffics in aspiration; its images are what women want to be. So the true believer fights over the images, not the aspirations. If the magazine would only put a fat woman on the cover, then women will want to be fat and women who are already fat will be considered sexy, beautiful and chic. Their self-esteem will skyrocket and suddenly they'll be good at math and science and business and politics and take over the world!
Dean is catching a glimpse behind the illusion. The People want thin, beautiful women on their fashion magazine covers. ELLE is giving them what they want. Like a good Soviet, though, she reckons that we should leave ELLE alone and change The People.
However, speaking semantically, when I hear reeducation, I think Pol Pot.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Review: Sam Wasson's Fosse
God knows why I spent one evening several years ago watching All That Jazz. I didn’t like to watch people dance. My taste in musicals stopped at Little Shop of Horrors and the South Park movie. Perhaps it was because I was aware of Bob Fosse as a Director of Note, at least according to the criticism of the 80s, and had the opportunity to watch it.
All That Jazz is a film I can only recommend to myself, or at least someone just like me. It’s an odd film, well-produced all around, with good cinematic style and confidence but it’s just so...about Bob Fosse. One thought kept going through my mind: “How did this get made?” What was the thinking that led to a major-budget picture about the near-death crisis of a successful director-choreographer?
Fosse answers that question and it’s unfortunately anticlimactic. The 70s were just a different time in Hollywood. After the old studio system collapsed, there was a brief era of auteur-driven pictures. Studios didn’t find directors for films, they found directors and the directors had their own films in mind. Fosse had a solid hit with the Oscar-winning Cabaret and believed in old fashioned razzle-dazzle--something the money men could understand. The studio wanted to make a movie with Fosse and Fosse wanted to make All That Jazz. The money came together and the film was made.
The Fosse portrayed in the book is in line with the fictionalized Fosse in All That Jazz: exacting, passionate, adulterous and guilty. In the biography, he’s an interesting, if mostly static, character to follow around during two major transitions in musical theater.
Wasson keeps Fosse in the foreground and the shifting tides in the background, but I found it interesting to learn how significant Oklahoma was in creating what we now think of as the musical. That play integrated the story with the songs, using them to illustrate deeper characterization and plot points. Seems like it should have been obvious, but every good insight looks that way in the rearview mirror.
Oklahoma came right at the beginning of Fosse’s career as a Broadway dancer; Cats came towards the end of his life. Musicals shifted from focusing on song and dance to spectacle--think Phantom of the Opera’s crashing chandelier.
Wasson doesn’t shy away from including a solid critical appraisal of Fosse’s position in Broadway musical history. In fine journalism form, he quotes rather than editorializes, citing critics that point out that Fosse didn’t innovate the musical as much as he refined the post-Oklahoma innovations with style and further enrichment.
This makes sense. In the book, Fosse is intent on creating meaning in every aspect of his work. This step is supposed to communicate this feeling, etc. His shows were sexier and about darker subjects, veiled prostitution and murder and the like.
That’s not to say that Fosse’s stature has waned over the years. He seems to be a unique figure in the annals rather than a game-changer. He’s certainly fared better than his rival Michael Bennet, whose A Chorus Line was Broadway’s longest running show for a time and subsequently disappeared down the memory hole. Fosse’s style was enthusiastically embraced by Michael Jackson (and thus countless others, though none as thrillingly as Corey Feldman) and lives on whenever someone talks about “jazz hands.”
Fosse may serve as inspiration to creatives in that he pushed and used his limitations and that he worked tirelessly. Perhaps they should avoid, however, his massive inferiority complex and decades-long use of Dexedrine.
But Fosse is useless as a model for creatives because his success was based on so many destructive qualities, unique to him in a big, needy vortex. His work ethic, like everything in his life, was driven by compulsion, not devotion. His style was a product of making his limitations work, from his dancing to his shows. He made them work because he had to be successful.
Wasson does a good job drawing out how profoundly he was affected by his experiences as a child dancer in vaudeville. He specifically highlights how the advent of the talkies changed entertainment. Why go to see some no-name hoofer who was probably the 1,304th best dancer in America when you can watch Fred Astaire perform flawlessly on the big screen? The last days of vaudeville, as Wasson illustrates, stank of desperation, with dwindling crowds in the seats and never-will-bes on the stage. (This adds another shade to the aura of Jerry Lewis, whose parents were performers during this time.)
Hungry for disappearing stage time, Fosse started working in burlesque houses before he’d even graduated from high school. Here he saw old fashioned showbiz at its lowest level. The experience affected him in two ways. For one, he always had a store of old school razzle-dazzle to lean on. For another, the, er, experienced women he encountered in those places took him into the world of sex too fast and too soon. (A promotional picture taken at the time of these tours shows Fosse looking more like a child than an adult; he mentions how scarring it was throughout the book, and in All That Jazz.)
Fosse isn’t especially salacious but Fosse approached women the same way he did his work--compulsively. Wasson discusses four major relationships in the book and each one ends because Fosse couldn’t remain faithful. The last, Ann Reinking, later played a fictionalized version of herself in All That Jazz, which bespeaks of the incredible devotion he inspired in others. What struck me about these--typically showbiz--indiscretions was how guilty Fosse felt about them.
The Rawness has made a strong case for drawing the line between guilt and shame. Fosse didn’t dress up his infidelity with theories about modern sexuality or cry out, “How dare you judge me!” He beat himself up about his failures as a husband and a father then buried himself in, yep, more work and sex. He didn’t hide it or justify it--managing shame--he just knew he wasn’t doing the right thing--guilt. Reading about someone famous who feels bad because he did bad things, well, it’s like seeing a polar bear walking down Main Street. It’s just not part of the environment.
Wasson doesn’t assert himself into the prose, which I always see as a positive, and does a good job of pacing the book. Too many biographies wallow in early-life minutiae, but Wasson brings us into Fosse’s relationship with show business right away. We follow Fosse from job to job, with the rest of his life coloring the story, which is both a natural fit for the subject and the most effective biographical approach. The book does drag a bit at the end, if only because the cycle of work-> sex-> smoke-> drink-> ponder inadequacy is so incessant that even Fosse found it exhausting.
One element I was surprised that Wasson didn’t introduce was how the overwhelming rejection of his last film, Star 80, and the failure of his last Broadway show seemed to put a button on his career and, afterwards, he seemed defeated but satisfied. Fosse is presented as being driven by a fear that he wasn’t good enough to be where he was. He thought of himself as a fraud, and says so in many different ways, who only got by with a few showbiz tricks. Yet he had success after success with only minor stumbles on the way. Even All That Jazz, which comes to the edge of complete self-indulgence, was lauded critically and successful financially. Then came the vitriolic reaction to Star 80 and the (minor) flop of Big Deal and, though he kept working maintaining revivals, he seemed satisfied. The obvious arc is that he was searching for rejection and, getting it, figured that his work was done. For a man whose films ended with the rise of the Nazis, a comic’s heroin overdose, the murder of a starlet and his own death, that sounds about right.
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