I first listened to Chapo Trap House out of curiosity at the height of the debate over its white mal

I first listened to Chapo Trap House out of curiosity at the height of the debate over its white male “toxicity” etc., a debate that now seems quaint given the spate of imitative “based” socialists, and a debate that seemed ironic even at the time since the Chapo cast member most hostile to the prevailing sentimental identity politics was neither male nor white. I understood what they were on that first listen, when I heard them mock the Cheesecake Factory. Then I knew I was in Mencken-land, where the booboisie out in cow country need to be corralled by the metropolitan smart set—an aesthetic critique in the guise of a political one. The identitarians hostile to the Chapo style picked up, rightly enough, on this aesthetic rivalry between wings of the broad white middle class as irrelevant to liberation struggles conceived in race and gender terms; the titular borrowing of “black and brown” transgression for this edgy white comedy does suggest as much. For earlier instances of this same conflict, Ellen Willis’s early essay on consumerism objects cogently to this strain of leftism, even as her intellectual transparency later allowed her openly to defend empire:As expounded by many leftist thinkers, notably Marcuse, this theory maintains that consumers are psychically manipulated by the mass media to crave more and more consumer goods, and thus power an economy that depends on constantly expanding sales. The theory is said to be particularly applicable to women, for women do most of the actual buying, their consumption is often directly related to their oppression (e.g. makeup, soap flakes), and they are a special target of advertisers. According to this view, the society defines women as consumers, and the purpose of the prevailing media image of women as passive sexual objects is to sell products. It follows that the beneficiaries of this depreciation of women are not men but the corporate power structure.Although the consumerism theory has, in recent years, taken on the invulnerability of religious dogma, like most dogmas its basic function is to defend the interests of its adherents—in this case, the class, sexual and racial privileges of Movement people.Between Chapo’s hauteur and Willis’s bellicosity there is, I think, little to choose from. I reject the frame of the debate. Willis is right about the intelligentsia’s horror at social mobility and bourgeois insurgency, but wrong that this hostility is simplistically gender-, sexuality-, and race-based, as if James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and Susan Sontag weren’t also Mencken’s heirs, as if anti-populism’s biggest living target isn’t, for example, Joe Rogan. (One is struck again and again by the sheer, staggering falseness of identity politics.) And the Chapo crew are right, I guess, about the Cheesecake Factory—I don’t actually mind the food (I recommend the chicken marsala); it’s the décor I find a bit nauseating—but so what? Your Flaubertian revulsion at petit-bourgeois bêtise is politically irrelevant, and it’s even outdated aesthetics, exposed and contested by Flaubert’s chief heir at the high tide of modernism: Ulysses is Madame Bovary turned inside out, the petit bourgeois as epic hero and modern saint.Yet we can push the hero and saint thesis too far. Ulysses strongly implies that Bloom molested his daughter; his seemingly progressive identity as the “new womanly man,” a gentle onanist practically incapable of genital sex, is informed by Joyce’s reading of Weininger, for whom Jews and women were the same. That Joyce was Bloom much as Flaubert was Emma—an identity finding its formal antithesis in the texts’ impenetrability to the then-prevailing popular literacy, such that neither Emma nor Bloom could quite read the novels of which they’re the stars—doesn’t settle the question. Perhaps it can’t be settled, and we just want incompatible pleasures. We can’t even decide among ourselves what is a luxury and what a necessity. (I suspect, however, that breadlines are, as the poet said, really not a vibe.)I do like Adorno’s denunciations of “so-called entertainment,” yet his alternative wasn’t just “high art,” it was avant-garde art in particular, whatever would abrade the public’s eyes and ears, Beckett and 12-tone music, a position anticipating and influencing the atmosphere of so many small presses and little magazines and a longstanding wing of literary discussion online, critics who treat “translated literature” as if it were a genre, miserabilist late modernism, dour German tirades without paragraph breaks. A recent article laments that we live in two Americas, one that watches Succession and one that watches WWE Raw. Upon seeing this, I confess I immediately thought, “America should read a fucking book.” Even going back to the Bible would be fine.The Bible. Shakespeare. Austen. Dickens. If I say, “Read Saul Bellow! Read Iris Murdoch!” it’s to name authors from well into the 20th century who rejected poptimism and avant-gardism at once, authors for whom there seemed no real conflict between reaching a popular audience and staying true to the highest literary values. We are only in Grand Hotel Abyss temporarily, as long we remain The True Mainstream in Exile. We dream, however, of having it all. Tomorrow the world. -- source link

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