Cowboy culture.

I meant to blog this the first time it was on This American Life, and the repeat reminded me: Chuck Klosterman on how not to do cultural studies.

… the creators of “I Like America” had made one critical error: While they had not necessarily misunderstood the historical relationship between Americans and cowboy iconography, they totally misinterpreted its magnitude. With the possible exception of Jon Bon Jovi, I can’t think of any modern American who gives a shit about cowboys, even metaphorically. Dramatic op-ed writers are wont to criticize warhawk politicians by comparing them to John Wayne, but no one really believes that Hondo affects policy; it’s just a shorthand way to describe something we already understand. But European intellectuals use cowboy culture to understand American sociology, and that’s a specious relationship (even during moments when it almost makes sense). As it turns out, Germans care about cowboys way more than we do …

As I rode the train from Munich to Dresden to Hamburg, I started jotting down anything I noticed that could prompt me to project larger truths about Germany.

An abbreviated version is as follows:
1. The water here is less refreshing than American water.
2. Instead of laughing, people tend to say, “That is funny.”
3. Most of the rural fields are plowed catawampus.
4. Late-night German TV broadcasts an inordinate amount of Caucasian boxing.
5. No matter how much they drink, nobody here acts drunk.
6. Germans remain fixated on the divide between “high culture” and “low culture,” and the term “popular culture” is pejorative.
7. Heavy metal is still huge in this country. As proof, there’s astonishingly high interest in the most recent Paul Stanley solo record.
8. Prostitution is legal and prominent.
9. When addressing customers, waiters and waitresses sometimes hold their hands behind their backs, military style.
10. It’s normal to sit in the front seat of a taxi, even if you are the only passenger.

I suppose I could use these details to extrapolate various ideas about life in Germany. I suppose I could create allegorical value for many of these factoids, and some of my conclusions might prove true. But I am choosing not to do this. Because– now–I can’t help but recognize all the things Americans do that a) have no real significance, yet b) define the perception of our nature…

When I returned from my tour, many people asked me what Germany was like. I said I had no idea. “But weren’t you just there?” they inevitably asked. “Yes,” I told them. “I was just there. And I don’t know what it’s like at all.”

Epics of Cluelessnes

Sometime the Times slides its cluelessness past slowly and subtly, in a way that leads to doubletakes rather than immediate outrage. Sometimes, however, the Times comes in through the front door and tracks mud across the carpet on its way to beat you over the head while bringing in a faint smell of rotting fish. This week, it was the latter:

1. On July 30, the newspaper ran an article on how the Germans ease layoffs by having laid-off workers carried on payrolls that are funded partly by the laying-off company and partly by the government. They can get retraining and job help while in this position, and the psychological effect is apparently different and more beneficial than for those who are unemployed. All-in-all, an interesting and seemingly worthy attempt to deal with unemployment in a way that focuses on the health of the workers and the companies, rather than just the latter. How did the Times treat it? As if it were just a German attempt to massage the unemployment figures, one of Germany’s “creative ways to keep people off the jobless roles, whether they have work to do or not.” It continued to slip in the knife in the next paragraph. “Politicians laud the measures…as a bridge over the steepest period of economic collapse…but many economists argue that [it] could undermine confidence in the fall.” We can’t have that undermining of confidence; never mind that the Germans may actually be keeping people integrated into the workforce. In America, we fire people and if they stop looking for work, they just stop counting. That’ll learn them.

Cultural capital.

After reading this, Yglesias’s reviewlet of Funny People, as well as David Denby’s* recent rave, I wish that I could go see the film. Alas, I don’t go to the movies; I have kids. Anyway, it’s this line of Yglesias’s that caught my attention:

It also follows Knocked Up by offering a bracingly conservative vision of family life and obligation. It’s not a point of view I agree with, but it’s well articulated and done so in a way that’s divorced from the hypocrisy and petty moralizing of mainstream social conservatism.

What interests me here, beyond my own pathetic circumstances, is the question of how much more cultural traction conservatism would have if there were more legitimately talented conservative artists. I’m not saying there are none, mind you, but there really seem to be very few that can compete in an unfettered market of ideas, images, and songs with progressives/liberals/weirdos-like-Bjork.

But if there were, what would happen? Would the culture shift noticeably? I’m guessing it would. The easy test, perhaps, is to consider other nations where there are gifted conservative musicians, filmmakers, and authors, whose work captures the public’s fancy. Do such places exist?** And if so, what’s it like there?

* Who I still do not like. And whose opinions I still do not trust. And yet…

** Remember, I’m an Americanist. Which is to say, provincial. And poorly dressed.